What Does Your SaaS Stack Actually Cost to Run?
I looked up the infrastructure cost of 10 common SaaS tools and compared them to their subscription prices. The average markup is 27x.
I pay for 12 software tools. The combined subscription cost is $847 per month. That’s $10,164 per year.
I wanted to know how much it actually costs to run each one. Not what they charge. What the infrastructure costs.
So I looked it up. Server time, storage, API calls, bandwidth, compute. The public pricing of AWS, GCP, and the underlying services that power these tools.
The total infrastructure cost for my 12-tool stack: roughly $31 per month.
That’s a 27x average markup.
Here’s the breakdown, tool by tool.
The Table
| Tool | What I Pay | Infrastructure Cost | Markup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp (email marketing) | $135/mo | ~$5/mo | 27x |
| Hootsuite (social scheduling) | $99/mo | ~$3/mo | 33x |
| DocuSign (e-signatures) | $40/mo | ~$0.20/mo | 200x |
| Jasper (AI writing) | $49/mo | ~$1.50/mo | 33x |
| Loom (video recording) | $24/mo | ~$0.75/mo | 32x |
| Typeform (surveys) | $30/mo | ~$0.50/mo | 60x |
| Calendly (scheduling) | $16/mo | ~$0.75/mo | 21x |
| Canva (design) | $13/mo | ~$1.50/mo | 9x |
| QuickBooks (accounting) | $65/mo | ~$12/mo | 5x |
| Zendesk (support) | $85/mo | ~$4/mo | 21x |
| Slack (communication) | $150/mo (10 seats) | ~$1.50/mo | 100x |
| Analytics (Mixpanel) | $141/mo | ~$0.50/mo | 282x |
| Total | $847/mo | ~$31/mo | 27x avg |
Some of these deserve explanation.
Email Marketing: $135/month for What Costs $5
Mailchimp charges by contacts stored, not emails sent. I have 25,000 contacts and send roughly 50,000 emails per month.
Sending 50,000 emails via AWS SES costs $4.70. That’s $0.0001 per email. Mailchimp charges an effective $0.0035 per email. That’s 35x the infrastructure cost.
But the real trick is the contact-based billing. Mailchimp charges me for every contact in my list, including people who unsubscribed months ago. I’m paying for names that will never receive another email.
For comparison, Resend (a developer email service) charges $0.0004 per email. Still 3.5x more than raw SES, but they’re providing managed deliverability, analytics, and a UI. Mailchimp charges 8.75x what Resend charges for the same email delivery.
The $135/month is not for sending emails. It’s for the list management UI and the brand name.
E-Signatures: 200x Markup
This one stopped me.
DocuSign’s Personal plan is $10/month for 5 envelopes. The Business Pro plan is $40/user/month for more.
Here’s what happens when you send a document for signature:
- PDF rendering: Generate the signing interface on top of the PDF. Compute cost: fractions of a cent.
- Email delivery: Send one email to the signer. Cost via SES: $0.0001.
- Cloud storage: Store the signed document. A PDF is 100KB-2MB. S3 storage: $0.023 per GB per month. A 1MB document costs $0.000023/month to store.
- Processing: Handle the signature event, update the audit trail, notify the sender. Lambda compute: fractions of a cent.
Total infrastructure cost per envelope: approximately $0.02.
DocuSign charges $40/month for about 10 envelopes. That’s $4 per envelope. The infrastructure cost is $0.02.
200x.
Even their overage pricing ($0.50-4.50 per extra envelope) represents a 25-225x markup over the infrastructure cost.
The value DocuSign provides beyond raw infrastructure is legal compliance (ESIGN Act, UETA) and brand trust. But legal compliance is a one-time engineering cost, not a per-envelope cost. And brand trust doesn’t cost $3.98 per document to maintain.
AI Writing: The Wrapper Problem
Jasper charges $49/month for approximately 100,000 words of AI-generated content.
Under the hood, Jasper calls OpenAI’s API (or similar). The API cost for 100,000 words of GPT-4o-mini output is approximately $0.50-2.00.
That’s a 25-100x markup for what is functionally a user interface on top of someone else’s model.
Jasper adds value through templates, brand voice settings, and a purpose-built writing UI. But those are frontend features. They cost almost nothing to serve per user beyond the initial development.
The wrapper economics are stark. ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month and gives you the same underlying models with broader capabilities. Jasper charges $49-125/month for a narrower interface on top of the same technology.
AI writing wrappers are the highest-markup SaaS category I found. They’re also the most vulnerable. Every improvement in general-purpose AI models makes the wrapper less valuable.
Social Scheduling: $99 for API Calls and a Cron Job
Hootsuite charges $99/month for their Professional plan. Sprout Social charges $199 per seat per month.
The infrastructure behind social scheduling:
- API calls to social platforms: Each platform (X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook) has a free API for posting. The cost is compute time to format and send the request.
- Scheduling engine: A cron job or queue system that triggers posts at scheduled times. This runs on a server that costs $5-20/month total across all users.
- Content storage: Text, images, and scheduling metadata. Database rows and S3 objects. Pennies per user.
- Analytics: Pulling engagement data back via the same free APIs. More compute, still negligible per user.
Total infrastructure cost per user: $2-5/month.
Buffer, which does roughly the same thing, charges $6/month for their Essentials plan. This isn’t a loss leader. Buffer is a profitable company. They’re just taking a normal margin on infrastructure that costs very little to run.
Hootsuite charges 16-50x what Buffer charges. Sprout Social charges 33-100x. The product differences don’t justify a 33x price gap.
Hootsuite has increased pricing over 2,000% since its early days and killed its free plan entirely in 2023. Sprout Social has a Trustpilot rating of 2.2 out of 5. These companies are extracting, not innovating.
Surveys: $0.30 Per Response for a Database Write
Typeform charges $30/month for 100 responses. That’s $0.30 per response.
A form response is a database row. A few fields of text, maybe a file attachment. Storing this costs $0.001-0.005.
That’s a 60-300x markup depending on response complexity.
SurveyMonkey is worse. Their free plan lets you collect unlimited responses but only view 25 of them. Response #26 is behind a paywall. The data exists in their database. They’ve already incurred the storage cost. They’re just refusing to show it to you unless you pay $25-92/month.
The value proposition is the form builder UI, branching logic, and analytics. But Google Forms offers all of this for free (with less polish). The polish doesn’t cost $0.295 per response.
Scheduling: Free Alternatives Prove the Cost
Calendly charges $16/user/month for scheduling links.
Cal.com, an open-source alternative, is free to self-host. Their cloud version is $12/user/month. The fact that a fully functional scheduling tool can be given away for free tells you the infrastructure cost is near zero.
The components: calendar API integration (Google Calendar, Outlook), a web page for the booking form, email notifications for confirmations and reminders, and a database for appointments.
Total cost-to-serve: $0.50-1.00 per user per month.
Calendly charges 16-32x this amount. For scheduling links.
What’s Actually Expensive
Not everything is a 200x markup. Some tools have real underlying costs.
Accounting software has the lowest markup in my stack (5x). QuickBooks connects to bank APIs, handles tax calculations, manages compliance, and stores financial records. Bank integration APIs cost money. Tax rule engines require ongoing maintenance. $65/month is high, but the infrastructure cost ($10-30/month) is also higher than most other categories.
Customer support has moderate infrastructure costs because of real-time messaging, ticket routing, and the AI/ML components that power auto-responses. Zendesk’s $85/agent/month is still a 21x markup, but the base cost is higher.
Design tools have lower markups because rendering engines, font libraries, and template management have real compute costs. Canva at $13/month with ~$1.50 infrastructure cost is a 9x markup — high, but much more reasonable than e-signatures or surveys.
The Pattern
Across 10 categories:
- Infrastructure costs have dropped 10x over the past decade. Cloud storage, compute, email delivery, and API calls are cheaper than they’ve ever been.
- Subscription prices went up 11.4% in 2025. Inflation was 2.7%.
- 72% of vendor revenue growth came from price increases, not new customers.
The gap between cost and price is not a rounding error. It’s the business model.
SaaS margins in most categories run 85-98%. The typical gross margin benchmark for “healthy” SaaS is 70-80%. Many of these tools are running at 95%+ margins, which means for every dollar you pay, $0.95 goes to things that aren’t serving you — sales, marketing, office space, stock buybacks, acquisitions.
What This Means
I’m not arguing that software should be sold at cost. Development, support, and business operations are real expenses. A reasonable margin is expected.
But there’s a difference between a reasonable margin and a 200x markup. There’s a difference between charging for value delivered and charging the maximum a user will tolerate before switching.
The subscription model was designed when infrastructure was expensive and needed to be amortized. Infrastructure is now cheap. The amortization argument is gone. What remains is inertia and switching costs.
45% of SaaS companies have already adopted some form of usage-based pricing. 61% are testing or planning it. The shift from “pay monthly regardless” to “pay for what you use” is already underway in the industry.
For the tools I use — email, signatures, scheduling, surveys, AI writing — the math is simple. Infrastructure costs pennies. Subscriptions cost dollars. The gap is 10-200x.
Someone’s going to close that gap. The economics make it inevitable.
My total SaaS spend: $847/month. Infrastructure cost of the same functionality: ~$31/month. The difference: $816/month, or $9,792/year.
That’s the math. Make of it what you will.