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wiki/syntheses/unit-economics-pricing-2026-06-29.md

Scout Unit Economics And Pricing

Date: 2026-06-29 Status: Active launch gate Last Updated: 2026-07-03

Decision

Arijit rejected the previous $22 one-time hosted beta pass and $9/month starter concepts as arbitrary. They are not approved pricing.

Scout pricing must now be derived from unit economics before the website, checkout, launch plan, or sales motion can claim a hosted price.

Current Pricing Direction

  • Local Scout remains free during beta because the user brings compute, browser, storage, and optional keys.
  • Hosted Scout remains metered. Beta access now uses name/email self-service key registration plus one-time API-key email delivery; paid checkout remains a separate credit-package path.
  • The approved current beta paid model is pay-as-you-go/prepaid standard credits: $10 / 1,000, $25 / 3,000, and $100 / 15,000.
  • Subscriptions are deferred until usage telemetry proves recurring value.
  • Browser, LLM, storage, security, support, and maintenance costs must be represented in pricing.

Current Credit And Package Model

Metered action Credit cost
Hosted scrape 1 standard credit
Returned crawl page 1 standard credit
Product or intelligence record 1 standard credit
Screenshot 3 standard credits
Browser render 5 browser credits
Browser minute 10 browser credits
Package Price Credits Notes
beta_trial $0 100 standard credits 30-day beta trial; can be verified through Stripe setup-mode checkout; no browser credits
standard_1000 $10 1,000 standard credits Approved current beta pay-as-you-go package
standard_3000 $25 3,000 standard credits Approved current beta volume package
standard_15000 $100 15,000 standard credits Approved current beta heavier-usage package

Under the current default assumptions, the $10 / 1,000 standard credits package has estimated loaded cost of $2.59, estimated gross margin of 74.1%, and break-even of 17 packs/month against a $120/month fixed-cost assumption. These numbers are code-backed assumptions for the current beta pricing posture; they still need real production cost telemetry before broader commercial scaling.

2026-07-03 Production Readiness State

Code-backed package metadata is live through GET /v1/billing/packages, and the pricing page loads package, credit-policy, unit-economics data, and the assumptions behind those economics from that API when available.

Current approved beta pricing posture:

Package Customer pays Customer receives Estimated loaded cost Estimated gross margin Break-even
standard_1000 $10 1,000 standard credits $2.59 74.1% 17 packs/month

The API now exposes the assumption model as well as the calculated output:

Assumption Current value
Fixed monthly cost $120/month
Standard credit cost 0.15¢
Browser credit cost 2.0¢
Allocated support cost $0.50/package
Payment fee 2.9% + $0.30
Target gross margin 70%

This makes pricing inspectable and changeable. If any cost input changes, change the code-backed assumptions and let the API/website/vault recompute or display the updated model instead of hand-editing public copy.

Current beta access:

Path State Notes
Direct beta registration Code live, SMTP-dependent /v1/hosted/beta-key records name/email; when SMTP is disabled it stores pending_delivery without creating account/key/credits
Pending beta delivery drain Code live, SMTP-dependent /v1/billing/admin/deliver-pending-beta-keys provisions and emails queued beta users after SMTP is configured
$0 card-backed beta checkout Future/secondary path, Stripe/SMTP-dependent Stripe setup-mode checkout is supported in code paths, but it is not the currently deployed public beta entry point. The current public beta entry point is email-first registration through /v1/hosted/beta-key.
Paid credit checkout Code live, Stripe/SMTP-dependent Paid packages require Stripe secret, paid package price IDs, success/cancel URLs, webhook secret, and SMTP delivery

Current external blockers:

  1. SMTP delivery settings for hosted API-key email.
  2. Stripe secret key and success/cancel URLs.
  3. Stripe webhook signing secret.
  4. Stripe price IDs for paid packages.
  5. Live Stripe test-mode checkout plus webhook plus /v1/hosted/me verification.

The model is good enough to present as the current beta pricing posture, but not enough to mark paid self-service production-ready until Stripe/SMTP live smoke passes.

Required Economics Model

The pricing model must include:

  • fixed monthly costs: hosting, WAF/firewall/security, monitoring, support tools, maintenance, payment operations;
  • variable usage costs: direct scrape, crawl page, browser render, browser minute, screenshot, LLM extraction, artifact storage, retries, support time;
  • payment fees;
  • target gross margin;
  • break-even volume.

Break-even question:

How many paid units at what price are needed to cover fixed monthly cost plus
variable cost plus support/security/maintenance while producing the target
profit?

Repo Source Of Truth

  • docs/product/unit-economics-and-pricing-model-2026-06-29.md
  • docs/product/hosted-economics-and-usage-limits.md
  • docs/product/release-checklist.md
  • website/pricing.html

Open Work

  1. Fill real production cost inputs from VPS, SMTP, Stripe, monitoring, support, WAF/firewall, browser workers, storage, and any LLM usage.
  2. Estimate beta usage per customer from hosted ledger data.
  3. Complete live Stripe test-mode checkout, webhook, key delivery, and /v1/hosted/me verification.
  4. Revisit the $10 / 1,000, $25 / 3,000, and $100 / 15,000 packages after real hosted usage telemetry exists.
  5. Decide whether browser credits are sold separately, bundled, or kept private until browser-worker cost data is stronger.