FOR FOUNDERS
Margin is the product you keep
You built the brand, the product, and the audience. The subscription app built a scheduler, and takes a percent of all three. This page is the ownership argument, founder to founder.
The % is a margin decision you make once a month
Every renewal, a slice of your gross margin walks out the door before you've paid for product, shipping, or people. It's not a tool cost. It's a partner you never chose, with equity in your growth.
1–1.49%
of subscription revenue, off the top, before any of your own costs.
+$0.19
per order on top of the percent. High-frequency boxes pay the most.
Top 5
for most member stores, the app fee was a top-five COGS line before switching.
At exit, the % multiplies
Buyers don't price revenue. They price the margin that survives diligence, at a multiple. Whatever the apps skim each year, the acquirer subtracts several times over.
A store doing $2M/yr in subscriptions
Exit multiple
Annual drag on your P&L
$27,600 – $37,400
1%–1.49% + $0.19/order, published rates
Taken off your price at 5x
$138,000 – $187,000
The scheduler's cut of your exit
Owning changes what you can build
01
Your roadmap, not theirs
The feature you need this quarter ships this quarter: the AI engineer builds against your instance, not a backlog shared with 20,000 stores.
02
Pricing experiments without permission
Cadences, bundles, pause flows, winbacks: change anything. There is no app review between you and the test.
03
A story that survives diligence
When the data room opens, your subscription margin is clean, your stack is owned, and there is no % contract for a buyer to reprice.