Bottom line: the marginal cost of running a CRM, a short-link redirector or a form endpoint for one small business is a few cents a month. The rest of the $29 you pay elsewhere is sales, marketing and investor margin. We stripped those out and priced at the cost of the job plus a fair profit, which comes to a dollar.
What a tool actually costs to run
I coach small businesses on operating systems for a living, so I see a lot of software invoices. The pattern is always the same: a company with eight employees paying $400 or more a month for a stack of tools, each used at maybe 10% of its surface area.
When we started Dollar SaaS Club I did the arithmetic for our own stack. A Postgres row for a contact costs fractions of a cent to store. A redirect for a short link is one database read and one HTTP response. An emailed form submission is one API call to a mail provider. For a typical member, the monthly infrastructure bill per tool lands well under ten cents. Everything above that is business model, not engineering.
Where the markup normally goes
Most software companies are not greedy; they are structured. A venture-backed SaaS company needs to show growth, which means a sales team, which means a marketing engine to feed the sales team, which means pricing that covers all of it. That is how a contact list ends up at $29 per seat per month.
We made three structural choices instead:
- No sales team. You read this page, you click a button, you pay a dollar. Nobody will call you.
- No paid acquisition. We grow by being worth talking about and by writing useful things like this post.
- No outside investors. Nobody needs us to hit a growth multiple, so we don't need to extract one from you.
Why not tiers, bundles or "contact us" pricing?
Because every one of those is a tax on attention. Tiered pricing exists to make you feel the pain of a missing feature and upgrade. Bundles exist to make you pay for tools you don't use. "Contact us" exists to charge different customers different prices for the same bits.
Flat pricing is simpler for us too. One price means one checkout flow, one billing page, one refund rule, no entitlement logic in the code. Simplicity is a feature we can afford precisely because we are small.
What you give up
Honesty matters more than marketing here, so: you give up breadth. Our CRM will not run a 40-person sales org. Our automation tool has three actions, not three thousand integrations. Mini GPT is capped at around 50 queries a month, which is plenty for a freelancer and useless for a content farm.
If that scope fits, you pay a dollar. If it doesn't, you should buy the big tool and we will say so.
The annual option
Every tool is also $10 a year, and we nudge you toward paying by bank transfer (ACH) rather than card because card processing fees on a $1 charge are brutal. More on that in a later post. Either way, there is one price, it is public, and it does not change based on who you are.