Cost to benefit, per member and at scale.
Your Networks™ is text and relational data plus the photos members add — a static front end, a Postgres backend, and per-request serverless workers. A member costs about two cents a month to serve and brings in $2.33, so almost all of each fee is profit. Ten percent (10%) of our profits goes back to our members towards business projects they vote for.
per paying member
at scale
covers initial fixed costs
10% to member-chosen projects
What each member adds to the cost
Every member takes up about 100 KB of database and 0.55 MB of photos, as measured on the test copy, which is filled with generated members. For the estimate, every member is also assumed to sign in every month and use the most of everything in the table. The plan’s included allowance is ignored, and every member is priced at the published rate. The results are therefore a ceiling: real costs should come in lower.
| Per member | Assumed monthly use and price | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Data sent to devices | 100 MB at $0.09 a GB | $0.11 |
| 4 emails at $0.90 per 1,000 | $0.04 | |
| Signed-in user | $0.00325 per monthly active user | $0.04 |
| Database servers | one $1,870 server for every million members | $0.02 |
| Worker requests | 1,000 at $0.30 per million | under $0.01 |
| Storage | database at $0.125 a GB, photos at $0.0213 a GB | under $0.01 |
| Total | $0.23 |
Each row is rounded to the cent, and the total adds the unrounded amounts, so the rows add up to a little less than $0.23. So each paying member leaves about $27.67 a year of profit ($27.90 less $0.23). Cost stays under 1% of income at any size, and profit grows in step with membership.
At scale, per year
| Members | Income | Cost (ceiling) | Cost share | Benefit : cost | Profit before corporate expenses |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 million | $27.9 million | $229 thousand | 0.82% | 122 : 1 | $27.7 million |
| 10 million | $279 million | $2.27 million | 0.81% | 123 : 1 | $277 million |
| 1 billion | $27.9 billion | $227 million | 0.81% | 123 : 1 | $27.7 billion |
What could come back to the network
URS Technologies LLC, which sells memberships, puts ten percent of its profit into a members’ project fund for business projects that members create and vote on, in 180-day cycles — two a year. The fund is not an investment. Members don’t buy into it, own any part of it, or receive returns from it; a membership pays only for access to the platform. These figures are estimates, based on the estimated profit above; what the fund actually receives depends on actual income and costs.
| Estimated, per year | 1 million members | 10 million | 1 billion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Members’ project fund · 10% of profit | $2.77 million | $27.7 million | $2.77 billion |
| Fund per 180-day cycle | $1.36 million | $13.6 million | $1.36 billion |
By the same estimate, the fund grows by about $2.77 a year for every paying member, once the platform’s running costs are covered. A million paying members could fund about $1.36 million of member-chosen projects every cycle; a billion, about $1.36 billion. A member who does not pay still costs up to $0.23 a year, which takes about $0.02 from the fund.
How the estimates are made. The fixed costs are the platform’s own ledger, with domains spread over 12 months and equipment over 36. Per-member usage is priced at published rates: Supabase at $0.00325 per monthly active user, $0.125 a GB of database, $0.0213 a GB of files, $0.09 a GB of data sent, and one $1,870 8XL database server per million members; Resend at $0.90 per 1,000 emails; Cloudflare Workers at $0.30 per million requests. Sales tax is added at 6% on Supabase and 3% on Cloudflare. Nothing is discounted for volume, and nothing is subtracted for what the plans already include. A single database cannot hold a billion members, so the server line stands in for the many servers that would be needed. Workspace, domains, equipment and security are held flat. Income uses the $27.90 that reaches the platform from each annual fee. The fund figures are 10% of that estimated profit, and the 180-day figure is half a year of it.