Pricing, Cost & ROI

Subscription prices are held in shillings, shown in dollars and charged in shillings. Every part of that is deliberate, and the part worth understanding is which figure the server trusts when the two disagree.

Four tiers, four revenue shares and four client counts — recomputed nightly, applied automatically in both directions, with a sixty-day grace before a fall takes effect. Here is exactly what moves when a tier does.

A workspace does not lapse suddenly. Seven conditions are evaluated against five named thresholds, and one of them fires without any payment ever having failed — which is the one worth knowing about.

A plan controls two separate things: which permissions exist in your workspace, and how many of certain things you may have. They do not move together — the free plan grants every permission in the product and caps you at two users.

Costs in one currency, receipts in the other, both of them cash, and no treasury function anywhere. The exposure is real, it is structural, and it is nobody's job.

Duty is assumed to be a property of the country. In Somalia it is a property of the port, so two containers of one product can cost different amounts to bring ashore — and a system holding one cost per item has already averaged the difference away.

Freight was quoted, so freight is in the cost. Demurrage, escort charges and border formalities were not, arrive later, and get posted to expense — which quietly prices every sale made from the consignment.

Six routine tasks with a stopwatch against them and an annual figure each. The largest line is the one nobody complains about — and three of the six do not improve at all, which is the part that makes a case survive review.

A dollar-priced subscription is an unhedged monthly currency position renewed forever. What a 20% move does to it, the three second-order costs nobody quotes, and the difference between a contract currency and a display currency.

Overstock has an invoice; a stockout has no document at all. Which is exactly why every business carries too much of the first and cannot tell you what the second costs. The four layers of a stockout, and where the two curves cross.

One page, five parts: four measured numbers, one deliberately blank, the full cost including your own hours, a paragraph on what you are not buying, and three numbers with a ninety-day review date.

Free the way a puppy is free. Where the money actually goes, the three roles a self-hosted deployment quietly requires and nobody staffs, and the two situations where it is genuinely right in Kenya.

From a software company that would rather you buy at the right moment than cancel in month four. The sizes where a spreadsheet is still genuinely correct, and the six signals that say you have outgrown it.

A Nairobi build looks competitive against three years of subscription and never prices maintenance or the day the developer becomes unavailable. The four questions, a five-year comparison, and the two cases where building genuinely wins.

Whatever a vendor charges for, you will ration without deciding to. Per-user pricing pushes you into shared logins; per-module pricing breaks the records-referencing-records that made an integrated system worth buying. How to read either shape.

Four effects you can actually measure, how to get a before-figure for each, and the honest reason two of them are smaller than any vendor said. Including why one figure should be left deliberately blank.

Real, predictable and absent from every proposal, because seven of the nine are your hours rather than the vendor's. Each with a rough shilling figure and the week it lands — plus three costs people budget for and rarely incur.

Real numbers in shillings, ours included. What the subscription costs, what the first three months cost on top of it, and the three line items every quote leaves out because they are your hours rather than the vendor's.

The subscription is under a third of it. The five components, a five-year model for a forty-staff distributor, and the recurring item nobody puts in the spreadsheet — two hours a month of somebody tending the thing.