I priced the hosted version of my open source funnel builder as a small base fee plus a percentage of what flows through it: $29 a month plus 1% of GMV. The competitor everyone compares it to charges a flat subscription with tiers.
Then I did the arithmetic on where those two curves cross, and the result is an argument against my own pricing above a certain size. I'd rather write that down than have a customer discover it.
The crossover
Competitor pricing, taken from their public pricing page and re-verified on 2026-08-01 (check it yourself before relying on it, pricing pages move):
| Tier | Monthly | Annual, per month |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | $97 | $81 |
| Scale | $197 | $164 |
| Optimize | $297 | $248 |
Setting 29 + 0.01 × GMV equal to each of those gives the monthly GMV where my hosted plan stops being cheaper:
| Compared against | Monthly plan | Annual plan |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | $6,800/mo GMV | $5,800 |
| Scale | $16,800/mo GMV | $14,100 |
| Optimize | $26,800/mo GMV | $22,500 |
And the full curve against the middle tier, which is the one most people actually buy:
| Monthly GMV | My hosted plan | Annualized | vs Scale ($2,364/yr) |
|---|---|---|---|
| $2,000 | $49 | $588 | 0.25x |
| $5,000 | $79 | $948 | 0.40x |
| $10,000 | $129 | $1,548 | 0.65x |
| $16,800 | $197 | $2,364 | 1.00x |
| $30,000 | $329 | $3,948 | 1.67x |
| $50,000 | $529 | $6,348 | 2.69x |
| $100,000 | $1,029 | $12,348 | 5.22x |
At $100k a month I'd be charging over five times what the flat competitor charges. That's not a rounding error, that's a different product category.
Why anyone chooses a revenue share anyway
Because the left half of that table is the half most people live in.
A merchant doing $2,000 a month pays $49 instead of $197. That's not a 20% saving, it's a quarter of the price, and more importantly it's a price that doesn't have to be justified before the thing has made any money. A $197 monthly bill on $2,000 of revenue is 10% of the business's entire top line going to one tool.
That's the actual pitch for percentage pricing, and it isn't cleverness: it moves the cost to after the value. A flat subscription asks the customer to pay for capacity they might not use. A percentage asks them to pay in proportion to what they got. Below the crossover, the customer is strictly better off, and so am I, because I'm getting revenue from a segment that would otherwise not have bought anything.
And why it turns hostile above the line
The problem with percentage pricing is that it scales with a number that has nothing to do with what I spend.
Serving a checkout page for a $500 order costs me exactly what serving a $20 order costs. My infrastructure cost tracks requests, not dollars. So above the crossover the customer is paying for growth that costs me nothing to support, and the more successful they are the more visibly wrong the bill looks. That's a price that gets renegotiated or churned, not one that holds.
Percentage pricing is a bet that your customers stay small. If they don't, you either become the thing they're trying to leave, or you cap it. I'd rather say out loud where the line is.
The third option, which is the point of this being open source
There's a column missing from that table: self-hosted, which is $0 in licence fees.
The software is open source under a permissive licence. Above roughly $16,800 a month in GMV, the honest recommendation from the person who wrote it is: stop paying me, run it yourself. What you pay instead:
- A small server and a Postgres instance. Call it $20 to $60 a month for a shop at this scale.
- The upgrade command, occasionally.
- Your own backups.
That's a real cost and it isn't zero, but it's flat, and flat is what you want once your revenue is the number that's growing.
This is the argument for open source that I find convincing, and it's not about ideology. The exit is priced in from day one. A customer who outgrows my hosted pricing takes their data and runs the same code somewhere cheaper. That constrains what I can charge, which is exactly the property that makes the hosted plan trustworthy on the way up.
What this comparison deliberately doesn't cover
Being precise about the limits, since a price table invites over-reading:
- This is price only. The tiers being compared differ in limits, seats and included features. I'm comparing what you pay, not what you get, and anyone choosing between them should compare the features they actually need.
- Payment processing fees are excluded on both sides. Stripe and PayPal take their cut regardless of who hosts the funnel.
- The competitor's prices are a snapshot from 2026-08-01. The crossover moves when they move.
- Self-hosted infrastructure cost is an estimate, not a measurement, and it depends entirely on your traffic and your provider.
The arithmetic is arithmetic. The conclusion is a judgment, and it's this: percentage pricing is the right answer for people starting out and the wrong answer for people who have arrived, and any vendor selling it should be able to tell you which one you are.
Top comments (1)
I like that you show the crossover instead of treating pricing as a one-way optimization. The strongest trust signal here is the self-hosted exit: customers can stay on the hosted path while small, then move once revenue share stops matching the value. I’d also make the migration and backup story part of the comparison, since operational confidence matters as much as the license fee.