In this guide
Two products can both charge $20 a month, both have 200 customers, and end up with very different margins. The difference is almost never hosting. It's the one thing each product does a lot of: sending emails, storing photos, texting customers, or nothing much at all.
This guide prices four common kinds of small software at 200 customers paying $20 a month ($4,000 in revenue), shows which line grows fastest for each, and what that means for your pricing. All four examples are hypothetical; every unit price comes from the providers' published pages.
In brief
- What your product sends, stores or serves decides which cost grows fastest.
- Email-heavy products hit email tiers. File-heavy products pay for transfer. Message-heavy products pay per text. Quiet products mostly pay card fees.
- Estimate your heaviest line before setting a price, and design your plans around it.
What all four have in common
Every example uses the same baseline: a paid hosting plan, a paid database plan (no pausing, daily backups), and card fees of about $1.02 per $20 payment with a direct processor and subscription billing[3]. At 200 customers, that's:
What's different is what sits on top.
1. A reminder tool (email-heavy)
Hypothetical example
Weekly reminders that ask a bookkeeper's clients to upload receipts. Each customer has around 20 clients, and each client gets about four reminders a month.
The line to watch: clients per customer
Email volume grows with your customers' clients, not your customers. A bookkeeper with 60 clients triples the volume of one with 20 at the same price. The first paid tier covers 50,000 a month; past that, the next tier is $90 for 100,000, and extra emails cost $0.90 per 1,000[2].
How to price it
- Plans by number of clients ("up to 25 clients", "up to 100") track your real cost better than a flat price.
- Deliverability is the product here. If reminders land in spam, nothing else matters; see Why your emails land in spam.
2. A photo gallery for photographers (file-heavy)
Hypothetical example
Photographers upload finished shoots for clients to view and download. Each customer stores about 20 GB, and their clients download about 10 GB a month.
The line to watch: downloads
Storage grows slowly and predictably. Transfer spikes: a wedding season, a client who shares a gallery link with sixty guests. Here, transfer already costs nearly twice as much as storage. If you served those files from your web host, bandwidth would be even more expensive; on credit-based hosting, bandwidth is billed per GB too[4].
How to price it
- Plans by storage ("50 GB", "200 GB") match your cost directly and are easy for customers to understand.
- Consider a dedicated file storage service with cheaper or free transfer for large media; database storage is convenient, not always cheapest.
- Resize images on upload and serve web-sized versions by default; full-resolution downloads only on request.
3. A booking page for barbers (message-heavy)
Hypothetical example
Clients book online and get a text reminder before each appointment. A busy barber might send 300 reminders a month.
The line to watch: text messages
SMS providers bill per message, and the rate depends heavily on the destination country, message length and the carrier fees and registration rules that apply in many countries. Even at low per-message rates, 60,000 messages a month adds up fast, and it's the one line that can turn a healthy margin into a thin one.
How to price it
- Include an allowance of texts per month and charge for extra, or make email the default and text a paid add-on.
- Let barbers choose which appointments get a text reminder.
4. An internal dashboard (quiet)
Hypothetical example
A reporting tool a small company opens a few times a week. Few emails, small database, light traffic.
The line to watch: the database pausing
Quiet products are the most likely to sit idle for a week, and some free databases pause after a week without activity[1]. On a paid plan this goes away. Almost everything else on the bill is card fees.
How to price it
- Your costs barely depend on usage, so price on value: the time the dashboard saves, not the resources it uses.
- Yearly plans fit well; business customers often prefer one invoice a year.
Side by side
| Product | Grows with | Bill at 200 customers | You keep | Plans by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reminder tool | Clients per customer | ~$269 | ~93% | Number of clients |
| Photo gallery | Downloads | ~$490 | ~88% | Storage |
| Booking page | Appointments | Depends on SMS rates | Varies widely | Text allowance |
| Internal dashboard | Customers (card fees) | ~$249 | ~94% | Value, often yearly |
Estimate yours in five steps
Do this before setting a price
- Write down what one customer causes in a month: emails, texts, GB stored, GB downloaded.
- Multiply by the customers you expect in six months.
- Find the tier each total lands in, using Free plans, mapped.
- Add card fees: about 5% of revenue with a direct processor at $20.
- If your biggest line grows per customer, make sure your plans grow with it.
Where estimates usually miss
- Pricing like a quiet product when you're a heavy one. A flat $20 for unlimited storage or texts invites your most expensive customers.
- Measuring the average customer. Your costs are set by your heaviest 10%.
- Ignoring your customers' customers. Clients, guests and invitees create usage too.
Questions
My product is a mix of these. What then?
Most are. Find the one line that grows fastest per customer; that's the one to build your plans around. The others can be absorbed in your price.
Should I add usage limits from day one?
For heavy products, yes, even if they're generous. It's much easier to raise a limit later than to introduce one to existing customers.
Do the five-step estimate above for your product, then try the totals in the bill calculator, which handles email- and file-heavy products. For how these costs change from 0 to 1,000 customers, see costs at scale.
Sources
Checked 14 November 2026. Numbers in brackets in the text point to these sources.
