If you've used managed DNS at any scale, you know the dance. You start on the free tier, your traffic grows, and one day you wake up to a $400 bill because your zone count crossed an invisible line. The pricing page never said "$400" — it said "starts at $0.50 per zone per month" — but the multipliers stacked up while you were busy shipping.
This is by design. Per-record, per-zone, per-query pricing is the cleanest way to extract value from a customer who doesn't have time to audit their own bill. It's also a tax on doing the right thing: SPF / DKIM / DMARC done correctly is a half-dozen records per domain, and you pay for each one.
The smart price
So we picked $9.99/month. One price. Unlimited zones. Unlimited records. M-Pesa or card.
The smart price is the only price — pay it and use everything.
Internally, the math is straightforward. A single droplet running our auth-DNS + resolver + SMTP costs around $24/mo. At $9.99/mo we break even at three customers per droplet. We're already past that on the lab instance. Every customer beyond the third is margin we use to pay for backups, monitoring, and the occasional new droplet when the active one starts feeling busy.
Why "forever"?
Because pricing pages that say "starting at" or "from" are pricing pages that go up. We don't want to be the kind of company that announces a pricing change in a blog post hidden behind noindex tags. If we ever raise the price, you'll see it before you sign up — and grandfathered customers stay grandfathered.
# the math, in three lines
break_even_customers = droplet_cost_usd / monthly_price
# = 24 / 9.99
# ≈ 2.4 customers per droplet to pay for itself
If you're reading this and thinking "they'll fold in a year because the unit economics don't work" — maybe. But the unit economics of a small focused tool company are different from those of a VC-backed multi-product platform. We're not trying to grow into the next Cloudflare. We're trying to make $9.99 a fair price for a tool you'd otherwise rent four vendors to replace.