Pricing Ladder & Unit Economics

#1. The ladder

Lead with the middle tier as your default. Let a price-sensitive owner self-select down and a keen one self-select up — you're not choosing their tier for them, you're presenting one and letting the other three do their job as anchors.

Run the Zero-Down math once so you believe it: $199 × 12 = $2,388 over a year, against $997 + ($97 × 12) = $2,161 for Launch paid normally. The no-money-down option isn't a discount you're offering reluctantly — it's the tier that pays you the most, because it trades a slower start for a full year of guaranteed billing instead of a one-time payment plus a plan the client could cancel in month two.

Payment mechanics, kept clean: 50% deposit to start, 50% on go-live, sent as a Stripe or Square payment link. You never see, type, or store a card number — the platform handles it, and that's not just convenient, it's what keeps you out of PCI-compliance and card-handling liability entirely.

#2. Why the care plan is the business, not an add-on

Present the monthly plan as included and default, never as an optional upsell you're hoping they'll take: "hosting, your domain, security, backups, and unlimited small edits — so you never have to touch it again." That framing matters because of what it compounds into.

Twenty clients on the $97 tier is 20 × $97 = $1,940 a month, recurring, before you build a single additional site. That number doesn't reset every month the way a services business's revenue does — each new client you close adds to a total that keeps paying while you sell the next one. A pure build-fee business has to re-sell its entire revenue every month; this one only has to re-sell its growth. Module 6 works out where that compounding actually lands at 50 and 100 clients.

#3. Unit economics — why margins run this high

Against a $997 Launch build, that's roughly $950+ gross profit on the build alone, and the $97/month plan is close to $90+ of pure margin every month it stays active — the marginal cost of hosting one more small business site on a plan built for many is close to zero. This is what makes hiring (Module 6) affordable well before you'd expect: the cost structure has enormous room in it before margin actually gets squeezed.

#4. What this ladder is not

It is not a menu you improvise from scratch on every call. Presenting four options cold, with no default, forces the prospect to do pricing analysis instead of deciding — which is exactly the extra cognitive step the demo-as-bait mechanism (Module 2's prior lesson) is designed to remove. Lead with Launch, let the other three sit quietly as the answer to "can you go cheaper" or "can you do more."