FOR FINANCE

Reclassify the line item

A revenue-share app fee scales with sales, so it lives in COGS and compresses gross margin every month you grow. A flat license is OpEx: budgeted once, immune to your own success.

Same job. Different P&L.

REVENUE-SHARE APP

Sits in COGS

Scales 1:1 with subscription revenue: every growth dollar is taxed

Compresses gross margin, the number acquirers price first

Unforecastable without forecasting your own sales twice

Renegotiation leverage: none. The rate is the rate.

INSIDER MEMBERSHIP

Sits in OpEx

One flat annual line: one approval, done

Gross margin untouched at any revenue level

Forecast for year three took you zero minutes

Worst case priced in: 60-day full-refund guarantee

Forecast the line, three years out

Start from $100k/mo in subscription revenue. Set your growth plan. Watch one line grow with it and one line refuse to.

Annual growth rate

+40%/yr

0%+100%/yr

Line item	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
Revenue-share app fees	$19,560	$27,384	$38,338
Insider membership	$999	$999	$999

Fee line uses the published midpoint (1.25% + $0.19/order, $50 AOV) on $100k/mo compounding at your growth rate. Three-year fee total at this setting: $85,282 vs $29,997.

What to tell the board

We currently pay 1%–1.49% of subscription revenue plus $0.19 per order to a third-party scheduler. The charge sits in COGS and grows with sales.

The billing infrastructure, card vault, checkout, payment API, is Shopify's and already included in our Shopify agreement. The app layer is replaceable.

The Insider Membership replaces it with one flat annual line: platform source, migration scripts, documentation, training, and community support.

Payback at our scale is measured in days, not quarters. The math is checkable against our own app invoices.

Risk is capped by a 60-day full-refund guarantee; migration scripts and training are retained either way.

Budget it once

One flat annual membership. 60-day keep-everything guarantee.

Become an Insider