Acceleration Platform Software COGS — Founder Brief

Reviewed: 2026-07-15
Currency: USD unless stated otherwise
Authority: DEC-177 through DEC-191
Boundary: Company-paid software, infrastructure, metered APIs and third-party charges only. Human labor and service delivery are outside this model and every displayed floor. Client-owned systems, quote-only rights and unresolved invoices are excluded rather than assigned a false zero.

Bottom line#

Yes, the approved product and architecture support viable software margins. The model works when fixed platform costs are shared, source-system subscriptions and partner entitlements stay client-paid or passed through, and production-only services activate from measured triggers.

“Buffered” applies a 20% operating reserve and then a 15% vendor/API contingency. Quote-only exposures are not hidden inside either percentage.

The recalculated workbook is retained privately in the strategy repository; the public site presents the reviewed economics below without distributing the spreadsheet.

Software price-floor implication#

For a first paid shared-SaaS pilot carrying the full one-client production stack:

• buffered software COGS is $575.92/client-month;
• the 70% / 80% / 85% software-only floors are $1,919.74 / $2,879.61 / $3,839.48.

At a repeatable 10-client shared allocation:

• buffered software COGS is $63.91/client-month;
• the 70% / 80% / 85% software-only floors are $213.03 / $319.55 / $426.06.

Dedicated managed deployment is a separate class at $944.38 buffered software/client-month and a $4,721.91 80% software floor before any excluded operational scope. This consistently buffers the full raw dedicated stack and includes DEC-180’s approximately $110 incremental dedicated-cell allowance before storage. In the client-owned/private sensitivity, company-paid software is $25/month with a $125 80% floor, while $575.92/month of modeled infrastructure remains client-paid.

These are software/infrastructure economic floors, not binding commercial prices or customer offers. They exclude labor, service delivery, quote-only exposures and client-paid systems.

The workbook separately shows ACH and card collection math. Stripe’s published US pricing is 0.7% of Billing volume, 2.9% + $0.30 for online cards, and 0.8% capped at $5 for ACH Direct Debit; checked 2026-07-15. Stripe Billing · Stripe payments

What raises and lowers software COGS#

Material increases in the approved production model#

• Seven-day PITR and tenant cells. Supabase Pro is $25/month; seven-day PITR is approximately $100/project-month and requires at least Small compute. The production cell model, not the read-only predecessor, carries recovery cost. Checked 2026-07-15. Supabase pricing · PITR
• Temporal Cloud. Local open-source Temporal remains the development choice. The production sensitivity includes a $100 monthly plan and $50 per million actions only when paid/shared triggers justify Cloud. Storage and support nuances remain unresolved. Checked 2026-07-15. Temporal AWS Marketplace
• ECS/Fargate and ECR. The model uses the approved managed release runtime rather than an invented VPS allowance. Published us-east-1 Linux x86 rates are $0.0404784/vCPU-hour and $0.004446/GB-hour; ECR private storage is $0.10/GB-month. Checked 2026-07-15. Fargate · ECR
• Recovery, encryption and observability evidence. Seven-day PITR, mature KMS rotation planning, Grafana, and one Supabase OTLP Log Drain per production cell are real production costs even when request meters are small. The drain is modeled at $60/project-month plus $0.20/million events and $0.09/GB egress. AWS KMS · Grafana Cloud · Supabase Log Drains

Material reductions and avoided cost#

• Shared Cloudflare and Supabase foundations amortize fixed account/project costs across clients.
• Direct OwnerRez/Breezeway slices and neutral files avoid a horizontal connector platform for MVP. Nango remains Auth-only and is evaluated only when the first DEC-179 trigger fires: a second OAuth provider enters production, more than 50 OAuth connections are live, or token lifecycle maintenance exceeds one engineer-week in a quarter. Starter currently begins at $50/month. Checked 2026-07-15. Nango
• Local open-source development keeps Temporal, OpenTelemetry, ClamAV and Tesseract license cost at zero before production triggers. Compute and managed operations remain software/infrastructure costs. OpenTelemetry · ClamAV · Tesseract
• Workers AI BGE-M3 is inexpensive at the approved embedding workload and retains a private TEI exit. The published rate is $0.012 per million input tokens, checked 2026-07-15. Workers AI
• Local file scanning/OCR first keeps Textract as a quality-triggered fallback. Basic Detect Document Text is $0.0015/page for the first one million pages, checked 2026-07-15. Textract

Usage stress remains viable#

The stress case doubles usage-driven workload without doubling fixed fees.

The 1,000-client stress step is driven mainly by tenant cells, Temporal actions, Supabase/Auth usage, telemetry, email and managed runtime. It does not break the shared-SaaS software model.

Property-count sensitivity#

At a normal 10-client shared allocation:

Costs to keep client-paid, capped or separate#

Keep client-paid or passed through:

• PMS, operations, pricing and communications subscriptions;
• OwnerRez/Breezeway/other source partner entitlements and direct API add-ons;
• client-owned/private cloud invoices and client-selected identity, SMTP or KMS;
• client-requested compliance, penetration testing or certification scope.

Cap or price separately:

• heavy reprocessing, historical backfills and uncapped source polling;
• Textract fallback and other document-feature tiers;
• browser/Playwright export delivery and large exports;
• dedicated cells, isolation, residency and enhanced retention;
• high-volume email and payment collection fees.

Defer until measured triggers fire:

• Nango Auth-only, private TEI, analytical warehouse, extra tenant cells, longer observability retention, enterprise identity and any horizontal connector platform.

Current vendor facts behind the shared stack#

All checked 2026-07-15:

• Cloudflare Workers Paid is $5/account-month with 10 million requests and 30 million CPU-ms included; Queues includes one million operations; R2 Standard is $0.015/GB-month with account allowances and no internet egress fee. Workers · Queues · R2
• Grafana Cloud Pro starts at $19/month and currently includes 50 GB each of logs and traces; the model keeps overage as an explicit GB meter. Grafana Cloud
• Resend’s current public tiers are $20 for 50,000 emails and $90 for 100,000, each with $0.90/1,000 overage. These replace older illustrative values in DEC-189 without changing the Resend-with-SES/client-SMTP exit decision. Resend
• SES outbound email is $0.10/1,000 messages before attachment data or optional features and remains an exit sensitivity, not a double-counted charge. Amazon SES

What prevents a binding software price today#

1. actual shared vendor invoices and payer allocation;
2. written source/partner rights, quotas and fees for any connector absorbed into scope;
3. Temporal Cloud storage/support and retention confirmation;
4. deployment region, tax and egress treatment;
5. any dedicated/private security, compliance or acceptance scope.

Human labor and service delivery are intentionally outside this model and must not be inferred from these floors.

Next founder pricing decision#

Choose the software risk boundary for the first paid pilot:

• which source subscriptions and entitlements are explicitly client-paid;
• the cap and overage treatment for backfills, document fallback and browser delivery;
• whether collection fees are passed through or included;
• whether the first pilot must carry the full single-client production stack or may use a time-bounded, explicitly non-repeatable shared allocation.

Do not publish a binding customer price until those boundaries and the unresolved invoice/rights items are confirmed.