Build Permit Pro

Operating Cost & Projections

◐ system

What the product costs to run · every figure CAD — vendor rates quoted in USD are converted at 1.37, as at 2026-08-19

Payment processing is 90% of the cost of serving a customer. Compute, storage, bandwidth and AI together come to $2.69; the cloud itself is $0.45. The client is a static application served from the CDN edge at no per-request cost, collection runs on a schedule that scales with markets rather than customers, and the API is billed at $2 per million invocations. Effort spent optimising infrastructure is misdirected — the one meaningful lever is the Stripe rate, and the 0.7% Billing surcharge in particular is worth challenging at volume.

Cost to serve one customer for one year

Average revenue is derived from the published price list against an expected purchase mix, with the coverage discount applied to geography only — workspace plans carry no readiness discount. The discount factor itself is measured from the model rather than assumed: 91% of list is charged across the 17 regions today, up as mapping lands.

Fixed platform cost

Ingestion is charged against markets covered, not customers — 96 locations at roughly $6 each per year. That is the whole reason adding customers is nearly free and adding a province is not. Storage grows under 400 MB a year against 8 GB included, about $1 of incremental cost.

Margin against adoption

The product has no meaningful scale threshold. It covers its own running costs at 4 customers and reaches 90% margin at 52; past break-even every additional customer contributes $574.09 against negligible incremental cost. Everything above that line is available to fund whatever the company chooses to spend it on — staffing and go-to-market are outside this page's scope, and they, not technology, decide when the business is profitable.

First year

MRR and ARR are both shown, because the monthly figures understate the scale at a glance. At month twelve this is $265,200 a year — $22,100 a month — against $13,204 of annual cost, leaving $251,996 of annual operating profit.

Cost columns are monthly. Serving is $2.16 per customer per month; $25.91 a year. Platform is the fixed base — $1,750 a year, $145.84 a month — charged whether there are six customers or none. It is 92% of month-one cost and 13% by month twelve; that collapse, not any change in unit cost, is what the margin column tracks.

At month twelve the product runs at $22,100.00 MRR against $1,100.36 of monthly cost — an annual run rate of $265,200 on $13,204. Monthly cost grows $941.56 across the year while monthly revenue grows $21,800.00, a 23:1 ratio. The ramp is an illustration of shape, not a forecast — no acquisition data exists yet. The cost columns are a direct function of customer count and hold regardless of how fast it actually runs.

Sensitivity

The model is insensitive to everything except revenue per customer and the Stripe rate. No plausible infrastructure scenario threatens the margin, and no infrastructure saving is material beside the payment-processing line. Vendor rates are published list prices and should be re-verified at contract; volume terms are worth seeking from Stripe and nowhere else.