(product) Pricing and Costs

[Lucas-Kohorst]

How do we want to go about pricing? Initially will have to pay for

Subscriptions

All payments and subscriptions done via stripe

• Stripe Pricing is 2.9% + 0.3c
  • Stripe is best in class, but given a low subscription cost ~$5 they will be taking ~9% of revenue

API Services

We will be using the following services

• Subabase, free for foreseeable future
• Axiom, free for foreseeable future
• OpenAI
  • Pricing is $0.02 for ~750 words assuming each question is generously about 50 words. ~$30/mo would get us about 25k queries.
• dust.tt, free for foreseeable future
• SerpAPI, up to 100 queries/mo free then $50/mo for 5k queries
  • It might make sense for serp (gives google access to the bot) to be a "connection" that users need unless we can find a cheaper alternative. Or tbh build ourselves it just scrapes google for top 10 or so results if we wanted to scrape it we could use browserless.io/pricing which would be basically free.
• Vercel, free for foreseeable future
  • Assuming we are hosting via vercel
  • Also I was looking through the tRPC docs and noticed this note about edge runtimes? Is this something we'd be interested in for deployment of the API? https://vercel.com/blog/introducing-the-edge-runtime

Hosting Costs

This is up in the air depending on how we deploy. For the start I was thinking

• Website via Vercel
• API via Vercel Edge Workers
• Telegram Bot via a scalable container runtime (likely we can get google cloud startup credits)

@ethan-stone when you get a chance if you could review, I briefly put this together to go through some of our costs and services. Basically

• are these all the services we will be using? Am I missing any?
• seems like even though we will likely need to put credit cards down for a majority of these, GCP and OpenAI will be the only primary monthly costs at the start

[ethan-stone]

A couple of things.

• Not using Supabase anymore. Now using PlanetScale https://planetscale.com/
• I don't know how I forgot about this but another option for container runtime/hosting is Railway https://railway.app/. Absolutely insanely easy and $5 credit every month

That's just after skimming really quickly. I'll update this comment with more stuff later and let you know.

[ethan-stone]

I've seen a few similar products and they seem to price by number of words generated rather than number of requests. Also none have unlimited usage so maybe we should consider that too. Food for thought