Every few months somebody asks why we do not sell monthly. It is a fair question and the answer is not ideological, it is arithmetic. Here is the version we would give an engineer over a coffee.
The cost of a month
A monthly customer churns at roughly 9% a month across the budget hosting industry. That means the average monthly account lives about eleven months — not far off a twelve-month term — but arrives with twelve billing events, twelve chances for a payment to fail, and a host that has to keep spare capacity warm for the churn.
In a crypto-only shop the failure modes are different but not cheaper: twelve invoices instead of one is twelve rate windows, twelve reconciliations and twelve support tickets from people who underpaid by the network fee.
What a term buys us
- 01Hardware is bought against orders we already hold, not against a forecast. A host is full the week it is racked.
- 02Capacity planning stops being a guess. We know in July what December looks like.
- 03There is no dunning process, no retries, no involuntary churn, and no team to run any of it.
- 04Support load per account drops by about a third, because most tickets cluster around billing events.
Put together, selling in terms takes roughly 22% out of our cost per instance. The rate card is where that goes: a twelve-month Base is €5.50 a month against €6.90 on six months, and both are below what we could offer monthly without losing money.
The part that is not in our favour
A term asks you to trust us with more money up front, and that is a real thing to ask of a host you have not used. So the 72-hour refund is unconditional and returns the whole amount, not a pro-rated part of it, in the asset you paid with. Deploy, benchmark, break it, and ask for your money back if it disappoints. We would rather refund a hundred people than argue with one.
If the term were a trap, the refund window would be shorter and the form would be longer.
And if hardware gets cheaper during your term, the renewal quote is lower than the one you signed. That has happened four times since 2014, most recently when the Genoa refresh landed.