What we cost ourselves to run FixAdSpend
Our actual monthly bills. Why we publish them. And how that constrains what we can charge — Starter $19, Growth $49, Scale $99.
We believe pricing should be defensible. The way we make ours defensible is by publishing what each customer actually costs us to serve. Then we add a margin that funds the team and infrastructure investments — no more, no less.
Here's what one paying customer costs us per month, broken down. These are real bills, not estimates.
Anthropic (Claude)
Every agent recommendation involves at least one Claude call. Haiku for cheap classifications (~$0.001 per call), Sonnet for diagnosis-heavy ones (~$0.02-0.05). Prompt caching cuts the repeating system-prompt portion by ~90%; the Batch API on the nightly cron cuts it by another 50%.
Per active Growth-tier customer per month, with 12 agents running daily over an account with ~30 campaigns: $0.40-0.80 in Claude spend. We cap each agent at its monthlyBudgetUsd so a runaway loop can never eat the margin.
Vercel (hosting + functions)
We're on the Hobby plan during the early-customer phase ($0/month for the dev account; Pro is $20/month once we cross 100 active customers). Function invocations and bandwidth are well within the free tier so far. We'll publish the actual line items when they materialize.
Neon (Postgres)
Free tier covers 1 GB and 200 hours of active compute per month. We're at ~30 MB total across all tenants and ~12 hours/month — comfortably in the free tier until we 50x the customer count.
Twilio (SMS / OTP)
$15/month minimum once you upgrade from Trial. We're still on Trial pending business verification — once we go live, this is the line item that scales with signups, not with active customers, so growth amortizes it well.
SendGrid (transactional email)
Free tier: 100 emails/day forever. We send password resets, deletion-warning emails, and the daily Sentinel digest. About 40-60 emails/day at current scale. Free tier holds.
Stripe
2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. On a $19/month Starter customer that's $0.85 per charge, or about 4.5% of revenue.
Total per customer
At current scale, marginal cost per Growth-tier ($49) customer is around $1.40/month: $0.55 Claude + $0.85 Stripe. Gross margin: ~97%. As we hit Stripe-fixed-fee absorption at $99 Scale tier, margin moves toward 98%.
So why charge $19, $49, $99 instead of less?
Because the price has to fund: the engineering team (us), the documentation effort, the inevitable support load, the legal review of every new platform integration (Google Ads API alone took 80 hours of paperwork), the ad budget we run to test our own recommendations honestly, and a meaningful runway buffer.
But also: anything cheaper makes us tempted to cut corners we'd hate ourselves for. $19 isn't a free trial that we'll bait-and-switch into $99. It's the price at which we can run an audit profitably and still answer your email ourselves.
What this means for you
You can verify any of this by looking at our actual pricing page and reading our /design-doc and /how-it-works pages. If we ever raise prices, it'll be because Anthropic raised theirs or we built something genuinely more expensive to run — and we'll explain which.
If you find a cheaper tool that does what we do, we'd genuinely like to hear about it. Email admin@fixadspend.ai and tell us what we're missing.