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Aromba — Money

How Aromba pays for itself. Numbers marked (est.) are estimates to verify against current provider prices before launch; the structure is decided.

1. Principles

1. Safety is never paid. Warden, cage, honeypots, panic, receipts — free forever, no exceptions.
2. The relay can be self-hosted. Relay code is open; aromba relay --self-hosted runs it on the user’s own machine. Removes “your servers see my data” and keeps open source honest.
3. One server is free forever. Growth comes from installs. People pay for a second server, for a team, or for not wanting to manage an AI key.
4. The hub is free for everyone. It grows the catalog; we don’t monetize it.
5. AI starts on us, and can be the user’s. Each paired server is given a capped key at the provider, minted by the relay against our own account (PLAN D108): the assistant works the minute the chat is paired, and what it costs us is bounded by that ceiling — a month’s everyday use is about a cent. A user who brings their own key replaces ours and picks their own model; their typical use is well under $1/month on a cheap open model, under ~$10 even heavy on a strong one (est.).

2. Our costs

At launch: under $100/month. At 10,000 servers: ~$300–600/month (est.). A Free user costs cents per year: one idle WebSocket and a few KB a day.

3. Cost of one assistant question (est.) — paid by the user

Context per question after the levers in 04-assistant.md: ~3–5k input tokens (mostly cached), ~300 output, usually two calls → ~7–10k tokens. On a cheap open model via OpenRouter (order of $0.1–0.5 per million input) that is $0.002–0.005 per question; a typical month of 100 questions is under $0.50. The user sees the price of each answer in /status. Our cost: zero.

4. Tiers

Annual: two months free. Why $30 works: Free is generous enough that nobody hits a wall; Pro is for people with more than one server, a team, or a year of history — and it’s still less than one hour of a sysadmin. Teams: an agency with 30 client servers pays $120 and resells “monitoring and reports” at $10–20 per client.

Retention tied to tier lives in the data schema from day one (30 days vs 1 year). Teams roles and multi-server are in the schema from day one; sold after phase 4. Skills are free in every tier; a skill never checks the tier.

Everything the assistant learns on its own (04-assistant.md) stays in Free. Learning makes the product, not the tier.

5. Founders beta

No company, no card payments until there are people who have shown they’ll pay. The beta is a ladder; every step is optional and paid in crypto:

1. Free Pro during beta. Every user gets full Pro while the beta runs. They use it first, then decide.
2. Founder seat — $1. The first 1,000 users can claim a seat: it extends their free Pro to the end of the beta and marks them as founders (badge on the dashboard). One dollar is the signal — a click is worth nothing to an investor; a paid dollar is a commitment.
3. Lock the founder discount — $30. Inside the seat there is a second offer: pay one month of Pro at full price now and get 30% off every tier, forever — Pro, Teams, and any tier added later. At today’s Pro that’s $21/month; the $30 pays for itself by the fourth month. This is where the beta produces its first revenue, in crypto, before any company exists.

Our cost for 1,000 founders: relay and storage only — tens of dollars a month in total (est.). There is no token cost, because everyone runs on their own key.

Beta ends when card payments go live. Founders keep their 30% on everything; everyone else pays list price. The discount is a flag on the account, not a fixed price, so new tiers inherit it.

6. Payments

• Now: crypto, prepaid. USDC, 1 / 3 / 12 months. No subscriptions on-chain, so the bot reminds when the balance is running out. A small watcher on the relay checks per-user deposit addresses; no third-party payment service — reading the chain needs a JSON-RPC endpoint, which is ours to pick, holds nothing of ours, and is told only which public addresses we ask about. USDC on BNB Chain first; Solana later, by its own design (one address and a reference key per payment). The relay holds only an xpub and derives one deposit address per user; no private key is ever on a server. The watcher polls Transfer logs for our addresses; sweeping is done by hand from the cold wallet.
• Cards: Stripe requires a UAE trade license or freelancer permit for a UAE account; no registration, no Stripe. Path when founders reach 50–100: a freelancer permit in a free zone (the cheapest route to Stripe in the UAE) or a US LLC + Mercury + Stripe. Lemon Squeezy / Gumroad as merchant of record for individuals is a possible shortcut if they accept UAE residents — to check.
• Payments happen only on the dashboard. Never in Telegram.
• Flow: dashboard → checkout → webhook → relay marks the account → the daemon receives its entitlements at the next sync (server limit, history, team).
• Cancel from the dashboard, instantly. Pro history kept 30 days after cancel, then trimmed to Free.

7. Model for a round (assumptions, not data)

Benchmarks used: free-to-paid for dev tools 2–5%; conversion of self-declared “will pay” founders at paywall 30–50%; monthly churn for infrastructure tools 3–6%, lower when tied to a server.

Add Teams on top once agencies appear; one agency with 30 servers equals ten Pro users.

8. Not doing

• Ads, data sales, “sponsored chores”.
• Charging for security, receipts, or the hub.
• Reselling AI tokens in any form. The key is the user’s; the model is the user’s; the bill is the user’s.
• Token or coin anywhere in Aromba’s payments beyond plain USDC as a payment method.