The percentage is coming out of your valuation.

When a CPG brand sells, the price is set as a multiple of EBITDA: earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

Buyers use it because it approximates the cash the business throws off, and, as one M&A data firm puts it, “cash flow is the fundamental driving force of business valuation.”¹ Deals are announced in this language: bought at 8x, sold at 12x.

The published ranges: founder-led consumer brands typically trade between 2.5x and 6x EBITDA at smaller sizes, 4x to 7x through the lower middle market², and the category prints run higher. Supplements M&A has averaged 10.7x over 2024–2025 (Capstone Partners);³ food-and-consumer private equity deals hit a 10.8x median in 2025.⁴ The examples in this paper use 5x and 8x, deliberately below the published category averages.

This is why every founder who intends to sell spends the year or three before exit doing the same thing: optimizing EBITDA. Advisors publish 12-to-36-month programs for it. The logic is the exchange rate above: every dollar of EBITDA you recover returns five to eight at closing.

CPG operators are trained by their own P&L: grow, and things get cheaper. COGS per unit falls with volume. Shipping rates improve with negotiating weight. Ops and overhead amortize across more orders. Scale pays you back; that’s the whole game.

A percentage-of-revenue platform fee is the exception. It’s the one line that never improves: it grows in lockstep with revenue, forever. Double the business, double the fee. The better your year, the bigger the bill. Buyers have a name for this structure (operating leverage, the ratio of fixed to variable costs), and they analyze it in diligence, because it “determines how much EBITDA changes”⁵ as revenue grows. A revenue-share fee is negative leverage bolted to your subscription book.

And because the fee is quoted against revenue but paid out of profit, it hides. Take a brand running a 10% EBITDA margin and paying 1% of revenue in platform fees. The fee looks small: one percent. But the margin is only ten points wide, so that one point of revenue equals 10% of the entire EBITDA line. Remove it and the margin goes from 10% to 11%: one percentage point of margin, a 10% increase in EBITDA. Same fact, two framings; both are exact.

Read your row. At $1M the fee is a rounding error. At $50M it’s half a million a year, and $2.5M to $4M of purchase price. The fee column grows every time you succeed; that’s what a cost with negative leverage does. And for the 10%-margin brand at any tier, the deletion is the same relative event: EBITDA up 10%, which, multiplied through, is a valuation up 10% or more. That’s the claim on our homepage. This table is where it comes from.

Buyers don’t price all revenue equally. Recurring revenue (contracted, predictable, cohort-tracked) trades at a premium: advisories put it at 1.5x to 2x higher multiples than equivalent one-time revenue, and note that “two businesses generating identical EBITDA can transact at multiples that differ by 2x or more” on revenue model alone.⁶ Your subscription book is the reason a buyer pays up for your brand.

Now look at where the percentage fee sits: on exactly that book. Not on your wholesale line, not on your one-time DTC orders: on the premium asset. And diligence models costs forward: a percentage fee attached to the revenue stream projected to grow compounds through every year of the buyer’s model. The fee doesn’t just cost you this year’s EBITDA. It rides the projection.

M&A has a standing practice: identified, achievable cost reductions get priced. Advisors call cost synergies “the most measurable and most defensible” value lever in a deal;⁷sellers present cost-reduction bridges; buyers, as one operating-leverage analysis puts it, “model the trajectory, not just the snapshot.”

A platform fee used to be nobody’s bridge line, because it wasn’t deletable; every platform charged one. That changed. An open-source subscription platform with an established migration path makes the fee an identified, achievable cost reduction: any buyer can execute the deletion after closing, which means a prepared seller can put it on the table before closing. The moment deleting the fee is proven possible, it enters the model, whether or not you’ve done it yet.

OpenSubs isn’t free to run. There’s a membership, and there’s infrastructure you pay for directly: your own hosting, your own accounts. Both land on your P&L, and both come out of EBITDA, same as any fee. The difference is the shape: they’re fixed. A fixed cost is a line your revenue grows past: the operating leverage buyers underwrite. A percentage is a line your revenue can never outrun, by construction. At small scale the two shapes can look similar; the table above is where they part ways. Run the crossover on your own numbers; it’s one division.