Pricing & Cost Analysis
Internal reference for infrastructure costs, unit economics, and pricing strategy.
Internal Reference
This document is an internal planning artifact. Use Pricing and Billing Guide for current public-facing plan messaging (Free / Pro / Enterprise with 14-day Pro trial).
Infrastructure Stack
Shardlyn is a control plane — customers bring their own cloud provider credentials (Hetzner, AWS, GCP, OCI, etc.). The actual compute, storage, and network costs are paid directly by the customer to their cloud provider. Shardlyn only orchestrates.
This means marginal cost per customer is extremely low.
External Services
| Service | Role | Free Tier | Paid Threshold |
|---|---|---|---|
| GCP Cloud Run | API / Control Plane | 2M req/mo, 360K vCPU-sec | ~$0.40/1M req + compute |
| Neon Postgres | Primary database | 0.5 GiB, 190h compute/mo | $19/mo (Launch), $69/mo (Scale) |
| Cloudflare | DNS, CDN, Pages (frontend) | Unlimited DNS, 100K req/day | Free for a long time |
| Cloudflare R2 | Platform-side backup metadata | 10 GB, 10M reads/mo | $0.015/GB/mo |
| Upstash Redis | Cache, sessions | 10K cmd/day, 256 MB | $10/mo (Pro) |
| Resend | Transactional email | 3K emails/mo (100/day) | $20/mo (50K emails) |
| Stripe | Payments | No monthly fee | 2.9% + $0.30 per txn |
| Sentry | Error tracking | 5K events/mo | $26/mo (Team) |
| PostHog | Product analytics | 1M events/mo | Free for a long time |
| BetterStack | Uptime, incident alerts | Basic monitors | $20/mo (Pro) |
| GitLab CI/CD | Build, deploy, security scans | 400 min/mo | Free (sufficient) |
| GitHub OAuth | Social login | Unlimited | Free |
| Linear | Internal issue tracking | Small teams free | $8/user/mo |
| Slack Webhooks | Ops notifications | Unlimited | Free |
Cost Per Customer (Marginal)
| Component | Cost/customer/month |
|---|---|
| Compute (Cloud Run) | ~$0.01–0.05 |
| Database (rows) | ~$0.01–0.02 |
| Email (onboarding, alerts) | ~$0.01–0.05 |
| Cache / Redis | ~$0.005 |
| Storage (metadata) | ~$0.01 |
| Stripe fee | 2.9% + $0.30 per txn |
| Total marginal | ~$0.05–0.15 + Stripe |
Fixed Cost Projection by Scale
| Paying Customers | Estimated MRR | Infra Cost/mo | Gross Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–20 | $0–700 | ~$0 (free tiers) | — |
| 50 | ~$1,750 | ~$30–50 | ~97% |
| 200 | ~$7,000 | ~$150–250 | ~96% |
| 500 | ~$17,500 | ~$400–600 | ~97% |
| 1,000 | ~$35,000 | ~$800–1,200 | ~97% |
Margins stay high because Shardlyn doesn't host customer infrastructure — it only orchestrates.
Stripe Fees (Real Impact)
| Plan Price | Stripe Fee | Net After Stripe | Effective Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| $19/mo | $0.85 | $18.15 | 4.5% |
| $59/mo | $2.01 | $56.99 | 3.4% |
| $190/yr | $5.81 | $184.19 | 3.1% |
| $590/yr | $17.41 | $572.59 | 3.0% |
Annual billing reduces Stripe's effective cut because the fixed $0.30 is charged once instead of 12 times ($0.30 vs $3.60/year).
Pricing Strategy
Currency & Regional Pricing
| USD | BRL | |
|---|---|---|
| FX Reference | 1.00 | ~5.90 (Feb 2026) |
| PPP Discount | — | ~30% |
| Rationale | Base price | Purchasing power parity for Brazil |
Pure FX conversion would make the product unaffordable in Brazil. The ~30% PPP discount aligns with what Stripe, Vercel, and similar SaaS products do for emerging markets.
Annual Discount
Formula: 10x monthly price ("2 months free", ~17% discount).
This is the industry standard for SaaS annual billing:
- Reduces churn (12-month commitment)
- Improves cash flow (upfront payment)
- Lowers Stripe fees per year (1 transaction vs 12)
- Strong marketing hook ("2 months free")
Price Table (Current Public Model)
| Plan | Monthly USD | Annual USD | Monthly BRL | Annual BRL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | — | R$0 | — |
| Pro | $59 | $590/yr ($49.90/mo) | R$249 | R$2.490/yr (R$207.90/mo) |
| Enterprise | $149 | $1.490/yr ($124.17/mo) | R$629 | R$6.290/yr (R$524.17/mo) |
Annual Savings for Customer (Paid Plans)
| Plan | Monthly x12 | Annual | Customer Saves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pro USD | $708 | $590 | $118/yr |
| Pro BRL | R$2.988 | R$2.490 | R$498/yr |
Unit Economics (Illustrative)
| Metric | Free ($0) | Pro ($59) |
|---|---|---|
| Marginal cost | ~$0.05–0.10 | ~$0.15 |
| Stripe fee (monthly) | $0.00 | ~$2.01 |
| Net profit/customer/mo | negative / CAC-funded | ~$56.84 |
| Net margin | N/A (free tier) | ~96% |
Competitive Reference
| Product | Model | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|
| Coolify Cloud | per server | $5/server/mo |
| Ploi | per server | EUR 8–39/mo |
| Laravel Forge | tiers | $12–39/mo |
| Portainer Business | per node | $15/node/mo |
| Pterodactyl | self-hosted | Free |
Shardlyn delivers more value (multi-cloud Terraform provisioning, workload templates for games/web/DB/DevOps, SSH CA, backups, SFTP, team management) which justifies the price premium over simpler alternatives.
Stripe Implementation Notes
Annual billing requires:
- Separate Stripe Price objects with
interval: "year"for each paid plan/currency - Database columns:
price_usd_yearly,price_brl_yearly,stripe_price_id_usd_yearly,stripe_price_id_brl_yearlyinplanstable - Subscription table:
billing_intervalfield (monthly/annual) - Checkout flow: pass the correct Price ID based on selected interval
- Frontend: toggle switch on pricing page (Monthly / Annual) for paid plans