# ADR 001: Early-cohort Pricing
- HTML version: https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/agent-friendly-remote-development/adrs/001-small-cohort-pricing
- Project: Agent-friendly Remote Development (https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/agent-friendly-remote-development.md)
- Status: Proposed
- Date: 2026-09-06
- Initiatives: Semi-autonomous Software Development (https://robbiepalmer.me/initiatives/semi-autonomous-software-development.md)
# Context
The current Hetzner CX33 list price is €8.49 per month in Germany or Finland.
One [public IPv4](https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/servers/primary-ips/overview/)
adds €0.50, making the comparable host cost €8.99 net. This excludes VAT,
backups, and paid networking or egress add-ons. A second workspace creates no
new compute bill while the continuously running machine has spare capacity.
An equivalent continuously running environment costs roughly $80 to $234 per
month from the managed providers reviewed on the project page. Those prices pay
for stronger isolation, lifecycle systems, and support. They still show that a
persistent hosted workspace can provide much more than £5 of monthly value.
The closest alternative for much of the likely audience is different. They can
take the open source configuration, rent their own Hetzner server, and operate
it themselves. The paid product sells convenience and saved maintenance rather
than access to secret technology.
Every user brings and pays for their own model-provider subscriptions and API
keys. The workspace product never resells, meters, or includes model usage.
# Decision
The brother pilot remains free. Use it to test onboarding and isolation without
turning a family relationship into a pricing experiment.
Offer the first non-family invitees one persistent workspace for **£15 per
month** with these terms:
* bring your own model-provider accounts and keys;
* no SLA during the invited pilot;
* founder onboarding and support included without a separate charge;
* one workspace on shared infrastructure with fair-use resource limits; and
* cancel at any time and receive an export within seven days.
The export includes all POSIX workspace and non-credential home-directory state,
with at least 10 GiB of export capacity. Before delivery, revoke provider
sessions and Doppler access and remove tokens, cookies, private keys, and other
login state from the export. Delete the hosted copy after the user confirms
receipt or after 14 days, whichever comes first.
This tests whether somebody prefers paying for the hosted experience over
running the open source project themselves. It does not attempt to recover the
founder's time yet.
Do not meter active hours or add infrastructure spend caps while users share a
fixed-price server. If the cohort exhausts current capacity, pause invitations
and decide whether existing revenue justifies the next server size before
buying it.
After three non-family users have each renewed twice, test **£25 per month** for
the next invitee. Keep both prices below the cost of a comparable continuously
running managed environment. Do not claim savings against usage-based products
for people who need only a few hours each month.
Using the prices and assumptions on the project page, £15 becomes cheaper at
about 64 hours per month against Runloop, 81 against Ona, 82 against Modal, 122
against Daytona, 173 against GitHub Codespaces, and 176 against Fly. At £25 the
same thresholds are about 106, 121, 139, 203, 248, and 294 hours. The intended
£15 customer uses the workspace throughout their working week and does not want
to operate their own server. These are workspace-hours. Parallel agents in one
workspace do not multiply them unless they require separate environments or a
larger machine. Revisit that description after interviewing and observing paid
users.
# Economics
Track two numbers separately.
Cash contribution:
```text
cohort revenue
- infrastructure added because of the cohort
- payment and currency-conversion fees
```
Shadow contribution:
```text
cash contribution
- allocated existing infrastructure
- founder onboarding, support, and incident time
```
Cash contribution prevents an unplanned loss during discovery. Shadow
contribution shows whether the product could later support a business and which
manual work needs automation.
The provider break-even thresholds measure customer value, not gross margin.
The current host has zero marginal compute cost until it runs out of capacity.
The conversion uses the same 4 September 2026 ECB reference rates as the project
page: £1 is about $1.353 and €1 is about $1.162. If one customer carried the
whole €8.99 net host and IPv4 cost, about £7.72, £15 would leave £7.28 before
tax, fees, backups, and support. The real margin depends on workspace density
and the size of the next required server.
At [Hetzner's June 2026 list
prices](https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/),
moving from a Germany or Finland CX33 to a CX43 adds €7.50 per month before tax
and networking. One £15 customer would cover that compute increase. Real
capacity must still be measured because concurrent builds and browser sessions
may exhaust memory before average CPU becomes expensive.
Do not include Work Graph value in the price until users rely on it. Linear Basic
currently costs $10 per user per month when billed yearly, Linear Business costs
$16, Jira Standard lists $7.91, and Jira Premium lists $14.54. Their free plans
cover many small users. Count the Work Graph as validated value only when a user
cancels another tracker, chooses this product instead of one, or pays more for
the combined workflow. At 160 workspace-hours, Codespaces plus Linear Business
costs about £25.13 and Fly plus Linear Business costs about £25.51 before Linear
coding sessions. Linear then charges provider token rates without markup and
$0.25 per 20-minute sandbox block. Twenty one-hour sessions add at least $15 and
160 session-hours add at least $120. At launch, Linear granted eligible
workspaces a shared pool of
promotional AI credits equal to $20 multiplied by the number of unsuspended
users. The grant does not recur monthly. Before token charges, £15 beats
Linear Basic after about 14 session-hours and Business after six. £25 beats them
after about 32 and 24 hours.
# Review point
Review this decision after two months or three non-family renewals, whichever
comes later. Record:
* retention at the quoted price;
* which users would self-host if the service disappeared;
* peak concurrent agents, memory pressure, and disk growth;
* operator minutes per user and their causes;
* infrastructure incidents and failed work; and
* the alternative each user would choose.
Raise the price only when retained users value the service and the next cohort
accepts the higher amount. Lowering infrastructure cost alone does not prove
that the product deserves a higher margin.
# Consequences
### Benefits
* £15 tests willingness to pay without copying managed-provider prices.
* BYOK keeps volatile model costs out of the product's economics.
* Fixed pricing matches the fixed cost of the shared server.
* Open source remains an honest escape route for people who prefer operating it
themselves.
### Costs
* Founder labour remains an intentional subsidy during discovery.
* A technically capable audience may prefer self-hosting.
* Shared capacity creates a small number of available places even when demand
exists.
* A paid pilot creates expectations despite the explicit lack of an SLA.
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