one sale pays for it
Spookat pays for itself when one visitor asks a question, gets an answer and buys. This post works through that math for three kinds of sites, a shop, a SaaS and a freelancer, with the numbers in plain sight so you can swap in your own. Our prices come from the same file the pricing page uses. The customer values are examples, and we say so every time.
the rule
One customer has to be worth more than one month of the plan. That’s the whole test.
Right now starter is $4.99 a site a month and pro is $14.99. After early access they’re $9.99 and $19.99. If you subscribe before early access ends, you keep the early price.
The /why page has a calculator for this. You type what one customer is worth to you, and it counts how many sales each plan needs to pay for itself.
We don’t know your conversion rate and we won’t invent one. Nobody can honestly tell you what share of your visitors will ask something, or what share of those will buy. What we can do is show how small the bar is.
a shop
Say your average order is $40. That number is an example, so use yours.
One order covers starter and pro, before and after early access. One question like “does this ship to Czechia” or “will it fit a 13-inch laptop”, answered while the visitor is still on the page, is the whole monthly bill.
If you think in margin instead of revenue, and you should, say the margin is 30%. That $40 order leaves you $12. It still covers starter, even at $9.99 after early access. pro might take two orders instead of one.
Shops also get something the math doesn’t show. The questions people ask before buying tell you exactly what’s missing from your product pages. That’s a free list of things to fix.
a SaaS
Say your cheapest plan is $29 a month. Also an example.
One signup that happened because somebody got an answer covers starter or pro in its first month. Every month that customer stays after that is on top. A SaaS customer is a subscription, so a single saved signup keeps paying for the chat for as long as that customer stays.
The questions are different here. “Does it integrate with X.” “Can I import from Y.” “Is there an invoice for my company.” These are questions from people at the edge of signing up. The ones who don’t get an answer quietly go and try something else.
If you plug in your own AI agent on pro, it can take the simple ones and hand the rest to your team, and it still costs $14.99 a site no matter how many it answers.
a freelancer or an agency
This one works a little differently, because the sale isn’t on your own site. It’s on your clients’ sites.
Say you build sites for clients and one client project is worth $500 to you. That’s an example again. One enquiry that turns into one project covers years of starter on your own portfolio site.
On client sites, the math belongs to your client, and it’s the same shop or SaaS math as above. Today, you pay for their sites from your account, through Spookat, and once one pays full price every other one is 30% off. Coming soon: hand the site over so the client pays us directly and you bill for your work. Both are on /partners.
what makes the math better
Yearly billing. You pay for ten months and get twelve. The bar drops a little further.
Extra sites. Once one of your sites pays full price, every extra site you pay for through Spookat is 30% off, on every plan. Not on Shopify or Wix billing. Three sites don’t cost three times one site.
No per-seat or per-answer fees. A busy month costs the same as a quiet one. The math above doesn’t change when your whole team joins the channel or when your agent answers a thousand questions.
what makes it worse
Honesty section. The math only works if someone answers.
A chat that nobody reads is worse than no chat. If questions sit for a day, the visitor has already bought somewhere else. The reason Spookat puts every chat into Slack or our inbox and its phone app is to make answering the easy default, but somebody still has to type the reply.
And a site with almost no traffic may simply not get questions. That’s not a pricing problem. It’s a traffic problem, and a chat widget won’t fix it.
try it with your numbers
The trial is 14 days on your real site, with no card. If nobody asks anything in that time, you’ll know, and you won’t pay. If one person asks and buys, you’ll know that too.
Run your own numbers on /why.