V7 Operator Economics — Pricing the Platform-Orchestrated Realm Fleet

Status: V7 commercial planning. Source: fills the planning gap identified in V1_V7_PLAN_SET_AUDIT_2026-06-12.md §6.2 (no operator pricing model). Grounded in V7/V7_features.md (features§"The Hosting Continuum", features§"Hosting, Orchestration, and Who Pays", features§"The Creator Economy") and V7/V7_ARCHITECTURE.md (arch§"Hosting, Orchestration, and the Realm Fleet", arch§"Danu — Server Meshing", arch§"Moremi — Realm Server Architecture"). Owner: Abundantia economy lead with platform infrastructure lead. All prices/costs below are planning assumptions adopted 2026-06-12 unless tied to a cited spec commitment; finance to re-base on actuals at creator alpha. Date: 2026-06-12.

1. Pricing Philosophy#

features§"Hosting" fixes the frame: the platform pays for inviolable services and a buffered official fleet; operators can pay for orchestrated capacity or bring their own compute. Within that frame, the commercial posture is:

1. Hosting is an on-ramp, not the profit center. The platform's economics are the creator economy (engagement pool, sales margin, storefronts — features§"The Creator Economy"). Hosting is priced to be obviously competitive with the FiveM GSP market ($10–50/mo for typical servers) so price is never the reason a community stays on FiveM.
2. Margin pays for what GSPs don't provide. V7 hosting bundles DDoS scrubbing, attested anti-cheat, Nephthys persistence with PITR (V7/docs/world-state-rollback.md), and the safety stack — the comparable isn't a bare game server, and the margin target (§5) funds that bundle.
3. Population is the price axis. Operators understand slots; all tiers are priced by concurrent-population cap, which also tracks the actual cost driver (sim CPU + bandwidth scale with pop — arch§"Netcode": per-client 64–256 kbit/s).

2. Cost Basis per Realm Tier#

Cost model assumptions (planning assumptions adopted 2026-06-12):

• Compute reference rates: dedicated-vCPU cloud instance ≈ $0.011 per vCPU-hour blended (Hetzner CCX-class on-demand; the repo's owned Hetzner bare-metal footprint — arch§"Hosting" Distributed scheduling — runs cheaper at ≈$0.006/vCPU-hr amortized, used for persistent realms; Spot for stateless sessions at up to ~90% off per arch§"Hosting").
• Sim sizing: Moremi at 10–30 Hz open-world tick (arch§"Moremi") sustains ≈32 players per dedicated vCPU including Ixchel sandbox budgets; memory ≈0.75 GB per 32 players + 4 GB base.
• Egress: ≈150 kbit/s average per client (mid of the 64–256 kbit/s budget) ≈ 1.6 GB per player-day at 24h occupancy; blended egress ≈$0.005/GB on the owned footprint + CDN mix.
• Realms idle: average occupancy across a month ≈ 20% of cap for community realms (evening-peaked — arch§"Hosting" webhook autoscaler); orchestration scales to demand, so cost follows occupancy, not cap.

Meshed node math (from the Danu design): single-node authority tops out ≈256 (features§"The Hosting Continuum"), but meshed regions are sized below that for handoff headroom — plan ≈150–200 players of authority per sim node (planning assumption adopted 2026-06-12; the co-location constraint and split/merge headroom of arch§"Danu" argue against running nodes at the single-realm ceiling). A 1,000-pop realm at peak therefore runs:

• ceil(1000 ÷ 175) = 6 sim nodes (8 vCPU each) ≈ 48 vCPU
• Nephthys replica allocation: 2 nodes (4 vCPU each) for the replication/persistence layer at this event volume ≈ 8 vCPU
• Danu control + gateway share ≈ 4 vCPU
• Total ≈ 60 vCPU at peak ≈ $0.66/hr on-demand ≈ $475/mo pinned — but dynamic split/merge (arch§"Danu") means off-peak the realm runs 1–2 nodes; at an evening-peaked 30% weighted utilization ≈ $140–200/mo compute + egress (1,000 players × 3h/day avg × 150 kbit/s ≈ 6 TB/mo ≈ $30) + Nephthys storage/PITR (≈$5) ≈ $175–250/mo realistic, with the $1,100+ figure as the pinned-24/7 worst case on cloud rates (owned bare-metal roughly halves it).

3. Benchmark — What the Market Pays Today#

Planning assumptions adopted 2026-06-12, from public GSP price lists and flagship-community Patreon tiers:

• FiveM GSP hosting: $10–25/mo for 32–64 slots; $30–60/mo for 128-slot performance tiers; serious communities on dedicated boxes: $50–150/mo.
• Flagship RP community budgets (Patreon-funded): $500–5,000+/mo including dev payroll — hosting is a minority line; they buy reliability and tooling.
• Plus what FiveM operators pay invisibly: Tebex fees, DDoS mitigation add-ons, database hosting, txAdmin infrastructure, and dev time for what V7 bundles (persistence, anti-cheat, voice — Pheme replaces a Mumble server).

4. Proposed Operator Pricing#

Pricing rules:

• Annual prepay −15%. Founding-realm discount per V7/docs/community-migration.md §5.1 (50% off Dedicated-256 for 12 months for the first 200 Verified realms).
• No pop-cap overage sales: a full realm queues (features§"Population Targets and Degradation") — selling burst headroom would undermine the queue-priority SKU operators sell (V7/docs/off-platform-monetization-policy.md §2) and make cost unpredictable for operators.
• Hosting fees are payable from creator earnings: an operator's Aje balance (engagement payouts, storefront revenue) can pay hosting directly — successful realms host free in practice, which is the flywheel pitch.

Carve-outs already specced#

• Official realms: the platform pays for a buffered fleet of official realms (features§"Hosting") — these are marketing/liquidity surface, booked as platform cost, never competing on paid features with community realms.
• BYOC: per features§"Hosting", BYOC carries sandboxed realm logic only, never platform services; the 15%/min-$19 services fee prices the platform plane the operator still consumes. GSP resellers get the certification economics of V7/docs/community-migration.md §2.4.

5. Platform Margin Policy#

• Target gross margin on paid hosting tiers: 35–55% at assumed occupancy (Dedicated 256: $44 price vs. $25–40 cost ≈ 10–43%; Dedicated 64: $12 vs. $6–10 ≈ 17–50%; Meshed usage pricing is set at cost × ~1.6). Planning assumption adopted 2026-06-12: occupancy-driven cost variance is the margin risk; the autoscaler's idle-hibernation efficiency is the single biggest margin lever and gets an owner (infrastructure lead) and a quarterly efficiency review.
• Floor rule: no paid tier is ever priced below its pinned-occupancy marginal cost by more than the Community Free tier's CAC justification — i.e., losses are taken deliberately on the free funnel tier only.
• Re-price cadence: hosting prices reviewed every 6 months against hardware cost and GSP market; price decreases pass through immediately, increases grandfather existing subscribers 12 months.

6. Revenue Projection per 1,000 Active Realms#

Planning assumptions adopted 2026-06-12. Tier mix assumption for a steady-state cohort of 1,000 active (≥weekly-session) realms, based on the FiveM market's shape (a long tail of small servers, a thin head of big ones):

Arithmetic check: revenue = 2,400 + 2,400 + 3,960 + 7,200 + 2,475 = $18,435. Cost = 2,200 + 1,600 + 1,500 + 2,880 + 3,150 + 270 = $11,600. Margin = $6,835 ≈ 37% blended including the free tier's drag.

The point of the table: per 1,000 realms, hosting nets ≈$82k/year — while the same 1,000 realms at the assumed engagement (≈120 weekly-active verified players per paid realm average) drive the platform's actual business: at a modest $1.50/player-month platform-attributable commerce take (storefront margin + engagement-pool funding share — features§"The Creator Economy"), ≈54,000 weekly-active players yield ≈$81k/month ≈ $970k/year of economy-side gross. Hosting margin is ~8% of the realm-driven total — which is exactly why pricing optimizes for realm count and survival, not hosting extraction (§1). Finance owns re-basing both sides of this table on actuals at each rollout stage gate (features§"Region Rollout Strategy").

7. Risks and Levers#

• Occupancy risk: if average occupancy runs 2× assumption, Dedicated-256 margin goes negative → levers: hibernation aggressiveness, Spot mix for respawnable sessions (arch§"Hosting" cost tiering), owned-hardware share.
• Meshed sticker shock: $480/mo is real money for a community → mitigated by earnings-pay-hosting (§4) and the founding-realm program; track the "meshed realms funded ≥50% by own Aje earnings" ratio (target ≥60% by month 12 post-economy-launch).
• BYOC cannibalization: if BYOC under-prices orchestrated hosting for big realms, orchestrated Meshed adoption stalls → acceptable by design (BYOC still pays the services fee and the platform sheds the compute cost), but watch that BYOC operators meet the same reliability bar (realm-health surfacing in the browser — arch§"Observability" — is the market's corrective).