Research date: 2026-07-14
Currency: USD unless stated otherwise
Boundary: Software, infrastructure, metered APIs and third-party vendor charges only. Human labor, founder time, onboarding labor, support labor, service delivery and general overhead are excluded for Taylor to allocate separately.
Bottom line#
The independently verified LTA-shaped read-only pilot is not a $503/month software stack.
| Known pilot cost | Monthly | Per property |
|---|---|---|
| Raw priced software COGS | $42.45 | $0.35 |
| After 20% operating buffer and 15% vendor/API contingency | $58.58 | $0.49 |
| Revenue needed for 80% software gross margin | $292.91 | $2.44 |
That known subtotal includes the full shared Cloudflare Workers minimum, the full Supabase Pro/Micro organization cost and an intended 240 GB R2 evidence vault. It does not hide unverified numbers inside generic allowances.
Five exposures remain deliberately unpriced:
- The actual shared Hostinger VPS invoice allocation.
- Streamline multi-client/partner API entitlement and any fee.
- Breezeway multi-client/partner entitlement and any fee.
- Direct Airbnb/Vrbo partner rights and any fee.
- The identity and contract behind the local RevA/Reva reference.
Those are not assumed to cost zero. They remain visible contract/invoice gates in the workbook's COGS Matrix.
Open the verified formula-driven workbook.
Exactly where the known LTA pilot dollars go#
| Layer | Raw monthly COGS | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Workers Paid | $5.00 | Shared API/control-plane minimum; normal requests, CPU, logs and corrected job-level Queue traffic remain inside allowances. |
| R2 Standard evidence storage | $3.45 | 240 GB less the 10 GB account allowance at $0.015/GB-month. |
| R2 Class A mutations | $9.00 | The 2.52 million-write proxy rounds to three million operations; after one million free, two million are billed at $4.50/million. |
| R2 Class B reads | $0 | The proxy remains below ten million included reads. |
| Supabase Pro organization | $25.00 | Paid non-pausing project, canonical Postgres, included daily backups, auth/API allowances and one $10 organization compute credit. |
| Supabase Micro compute uplift | $0 | The $10 Micro instance is covered by the organization's $10 compute credit. |
| Supabase database and egress overage | $0 | The modeled 4.8 GB database and 36 GB egress remain inside allowances. |
| Everything else in the frozen MVP | $0 | PITR, Nango, AI, document processing, WorkOS, Sentry, Langfuse, paid email, SMS, support software and payment processing are not activated. |
| Known raw subtotal | $42.45 | Excludes the explicitly unpriced contract/invoice exposures above. |
Official price support: Workers, Queues, Workers Logs, R2, Supabase billing, Supabase compute.
What the earlier $503 mistakenly bundled#
The old LTA case combined optional architectural choices as though they were unavoidable:
- $100/month of seven-day Supabase PITR;
- a forced Small compute uplift;
- a fabricated $60 runtime allowance;
- a $50 Nango minimum even though Nango is not deployed;
- $55 for Sentry and Langfuse even though neither is deployed;
- $25 of unspecified “commercial plumbing”;
- $26.76 of AI and layout parsing despite the frozen MVP having no reachable real-data model route;
- one Queue message per captured evidence row rather than per sync job/page.
Each item has now been separated, described and linked to its activation trigger.
Supabase decision#
The platform needs managed Postgres. It does not currently need the $130 Supabase configuration.
- Pro is $25 per organization, not per project, and includes one $10 monthly compute credit. Supabase billing
- Micro is approximately $10/month and plausibly fits the modeled 4.8 GB LTA database. The credit covers it. Compute
- Small is approximately $15/month and adds RAM/connections/I/O capacity; it does not create the isolated Postgres instance. Every project already has its own Postgres instance. Compute specifications
- Seven-day PITR is $0.137/project-hour, about $100/month, and forces Small. It replaces included daily backups, protects the database only and is premature for a replayable read-only pilot. PITR
Enable PITR when non-rebuildable corrections, approvals, actions or other production writes live only in Postgres; when the contracted RPO is below 24 hours; or when a restore drill proves source/R2 replay cannot meet the required RTO.
Optional software step-ups#
These are real prices, but none belongs in the frozen read-only base:
| Triggered capability | Raw monthly step | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase Small + seven-day PITR over Pro/Micro | about +$105 | Non-rebuildable writes or contracted RPO below 24 hours. |
| Dedicated managed worker | +$25 | Isolation/SLA, queue lag, OOM or client-purchased dedicated compute. |
| Nango Starter | +$50 | A supported commodity SaaS OAuth source is deliberately routed through Nango. |
| Standard Gemini 2.5 Flash + Layout Parser projection | +$26.76 | AI policy/evaluations approve a measured helper or scorecard route. |
| Sentry Team | +$26 | Multiple operators, more than 5,000 errors or more than 30 days of history. |
| Langfuse Core | +$29 | More than 50,000 trace/observation/score units, more than two users or more than 30 days of history. |
| WorkOS enterprise SSO | +$125/connection | A signed enterprise IdP requirement. |
| Resend Pro | +$20 | More than 100 emails/day, multiple sending domains or paid support/deliverability need. |
Sources: Nango, Gemini, Document AI, Sentry, Langfuse, WorkOS, Resend.
Source-system economics#
The client should keep paying for its PMS, operations, pricing and communications systems. Those subscriptions are not our COGS unless we bundle or resell them.
- Streamline: quote-only with unresolved multi-client partner entitlement. Written API rights, quotas, retention and fees are an onboarding gate. Partner X
- Breezeway: client subscription; portfolio-company API scopes and any partner fee remain unresolved. Pricing
- Airbnb/Vrbo direct: gated partner programs with unpublished price/quota terms. Prefer PMS-derived authorized channel data. Airbnb · Vrbo connectivity
- Conduit: $1,499/month through 120 listings is LTA's client SaaS, not our infrastructure COGS unless deliberately bundled. Pricing
- PriceLabs Customer API: $1/listing/month, or $120 at 120 listings, only when direct access is chosen; pass through to the client. API pricing
- OwnerRez Listing Content API add-on: a 120-property example is $152/month only if that specific add-on is required; it is client-paid. OwnerRez costs
The largest early risk is contractual access—not compute.
Corrected portfolio view#
| Portfolio shape | Buffered known software COGS | COGS/property | Known-cost floor at 80% GM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roam Free proving tenant | $41.40 | $10.35 | $207.00 |
| LTA current read-only pilot | $58.58 | $0.49 | $292.91 |
| 25-property utility client | $45.87 | $1.83 | $229.36 |
| 100-property utility client | $82.32 | $0.82 | $411.59 |
| 500 properties / 5 shared clients | $267.56 | $0.54 | $1,337.79 total |
| 2,000 properties / 20 clients | $1,404.10 | $0.70 | $7,020.52 total |
The workbook's 10,000-property row intentionally remains an aggressive-sync/heavy-agent stress case. It is not the recommended product configuration.
All figures are known software costs only. The unresolved invoice/contract rows must be priced, passed through or contractually excluded before a fixed-price commitment.
Buy, defer and keep ours#
Buy/use now#
- Cloudflare Workers as the shared edge/control minimum.
- Supabase Pro/Micro for canonical Postgres.
- R2 Standard when the immutable evidence vault is implemented.
- Client-owned subscriptions and client-authorized PMS-first data access.
Defer until triggered#
- PITR, Small compute, dedicated runtime, Nango, Sentry, Langfuse, WorkOS, paid transactional email and SMS.
- Direct Airbnb/Vrbo partnerships.
- Heavy agents, local GPU and managed workflow engines.
Keep ours#
- STR connector semantics and source-specific behavior.
- Canonical contracts and scorecard definitions.
- Immutable evidence keys, provenance and reconciliation.
- Admission/replay, freshness policy and vendor-neutral cost attribution.
Instrument now#
Every metered event needs tenant/workspace, source, connection, job, purpose, environment and payer attribution.
- Source entitlement, quota headers, 429/retry-after, pages, rows, bytes, webhook gaps and full-resync reason.
- Workers requests/CPU and Queue message bytes, operations, retries and DLQ events.
- R2 bytes/day, object count, Class A/B verbs, dedupe ratio, lifecycle transitions and rebuild/export reads.
- Postgres compute/RAM/I/O/connections, database bytes, egress, backup/PITR and measured restore duration.
- AI provider/model/snapshot, uncached/cached/output/thinking tokens, batch share, processor pages, retries and aborts.
- Vendor plan, included allowance, overage meter, invoice, payer and pass-through treatment.
Architecture verdict#
The direction is economically sound if the platform stays deterministic/read-only first, keeps fixed infrastructure shared, uses R2 for immutable evidence, keeps canonical data in Postgres, and passes client subscriptions or partner/API add-ons through rather than absorbing them.
The key correction is governance: every optional vendor now has an activation gate, and every unknown remains visibly unknown rather than becoming a fake allowance.