Running the numbers

A realistic target, and the pace it actually demands.

Two million in annual recurring revenue at twenty nine dollars a month is about five thousand seven hundred customers. That is the target, and it is chosen because it is reachable and defensible rather than impressive. Set against thirty six million small businesses in the United States it is sixteen thousandths of one percent, which is worth saying only to make one point: the size of the market is not what decides this.

What decides it is pace. Holding five thousand seven hundred customers means finding roughly two hundred and fifty new ones every month for about three years, without a quiet quarter, at a cost the margin on each one can carry. That is an operational commitment rather than a market question, and it is the thing this page models. Mail and domain registration are deliberately out of scope: the pod needs authoritative DNS, nothing more.

Read the colors. Dark blue values come from published rates or federal data. Amber values are assumptions with no published source behind them. Every one is named at the bottom of the page.

Where the customers come from

Three pools, and a target that barely dents any of them.

These are the populations, not the addressable market. The only thing they establish is that no plausible version of this plan is limited by how many potential customers exist.

Wave one · the tinkerers
50M+
people already paying monthly for a frontier AI assistant
  • OpenAI confirmed more than 50 million paying consumer subscribers across its tiers in April 2026
  • Anthropic does not publish a consumer count; outside estimates put total Claude consumer users between 18 and 30 million, and the company said paid subscriptions more than doubled during 2026
  • Google reports more than 350 million paid subscriptions across its consumer services, though that figure includes storage plans rather than AI alone
Wave two · small business
36.2M
small businesses in the United States
  • The SBA Office of Advocacy counts 36,207,130 small businesses, of which roughly 29.8 million have no employees at all
  • About 5.62 million new business applications were filed in 2025, running at roughly double the pre pandemic rate
  • Solo ventures are the overwhelming majority, which is exactly the segment that has never been worth a support call
Waves three and four · builders
47.2M
active developers worldwide
  • SlashData put the global active developer population at 47.2 million in early 2026, counting anyone who writes code monthly
  • Evans Data counts only paid professionals and arrives at 35.6 million, growing at roughly 5.5% a year
  • GitHub passed 518 million accounts in 2025, which is the ceiling on people who could plausibly want version history as a product feature
The model

Move the variables. Watch what breaks.

Two paths to the same revenue number. The first buys customers. The second already has them, which is the entire argument for building this inside an established host rather than beside one.

Revenue per pod

The primary dial. Everything below is a rate applied to this.
Fixed size pricing for the small business tier. Margin only becomes comfortable above the mid twenties.
No source. Developers on consumption pricing could land anywhere.

Cost per pod

1.0 is published pay as you go container rates. An operator on its own hardware pays less, which is the whole point of pitching one.
The largest unknown in the model, and the only cost that rises with the feature people came for.

Buying growth

Seventy five is the working assumption for paid social and creator content. At double that the ratios still hold and the timeline does not, which is the more interesting failure.
Resellers cut acquisition cost by roughly two thirds and take a wholesale margin. The model applies both.
Annual recurring revenue
Gross margin per pod
Contribution per pod
per month, after cost of service
Payback
months to earn back acquisition
Lifetime value to cost
Time to two million in recurring revenue
Where a pod's cost goes

The ramp

Discipline

What is sourced, and what is assumed.

Any operator worth pitching will separate these two lists within about ninety seconds. Better to do it first.

Published or federal data
  • Container compute. Two cents per CPU core per hour and half a cent per gigabyte of memory per hour, from bunny.net's published Magic Containers rates. Memory, not CPU, is what makes an idle pod expensive.
  • Persistent storage. Ten cents per gigabyte per month on provisioned volume size, though that meter is not yet billing.
  • Egress. One cent per gigabyte in Europe and North America, rising to six cents in the Middle East and Africa.
  • Domains, if they are ever added. The .com wholesale registry fee is $10.26 a year, going to $10.97 on 1 November 2026, plus the ICANN fee. Not in the bundle, so not in the cost stack. Kept here because an add on still has to price above cost.
  • Certificates. Zero. This used to be a line item and no longer is.
  • Small business counts. 36,207,130 businesses and 5.62 million new applications in 2025, from the SBA Office of Advocacy and Census Business Formation Statistics.
  • Developer counts. 47.2 million active developers per SlashData, 35.6 million paid professionals per Evans Data.
Assumptions, not measurements
  • Inference cost per pod. The default assumes roughly twenty assistant turns a month with prompt caching. A chatty customer could be ten times that, which makes it the first thing a prototype should measure.
  • Acquisition cost. Seventy five dollars is an assumption, not an observation. It is testable for a few thousand dollars of ad spend, which is cheap enough to settle early.
  • Churn. Two and a half percent monthly is a guess in the right neighbourhood for small business hosting, and the number that most affects the answer.
  • Residual support. The premise is that the assistant absorbs routine questions. Nobody has measured how much.
  • Measured pricing revenue. No idea what a developer on consumption pricing actually bills. Wide enough range to be nearly meaningless.
  • Migration take rate. What share of an existing shared hosting base would accept a move, and how many would use the moment to leave instead.
The conclusion the model keeps reaching

The economics work either way. Only one of the two paths can realistically be staffed.

At any sensible price above the mid twenties, contribution per pod carries a seventy five dollar acquisition cost several times over, and carries a hundred and fifty dollar one comfortably. The unit economics are not the problem.

The problem is throughput. Roughly two hundred and fifty net new customers a month, sustained for about three years, is a marketing operation. An established host with a few hundred thousand existing customers reaches the same revenue by moving two tenths of one percent of its base per month, at a fraction of the cost, with the churn risk pointing the other way.

Read the commercial model for how the billing works, and the open questions for what is still unresolved.