Lance operating-cost calculator

Scope: human labour is intentionally excluded. The pilot tests whether Lance reduces existing concierge work or increases its throughput.

Pilot operating-cost assumptions

Pilot participants Pilot duration (months) Monthly briefs / participant Calculated monthly briefs0

Pilot participants are treated as active Lance users. This stage estimates messaging, AI and number costs only; rollout tiers, uptake and revenue do not affect it.

Successful rollout by membership tier

Uptake is the percentage of reached members in each tier who become active Lance users during rollout. Briefs per user is their average monthly hiring activity. These assumptions do not affect the pilot. A Lance add-on plan is an optional recurring charge paid by active Lance users.

Rollout adoption

Wider member pool Calculated active users, month 10 Monthly uptake growth (%) Rollout months

After pilot success, rollout starts as a separate stage. Each tier's uptake is applied directly to that tier's share of the full member pool. Uptake then grows by the stated percentage each month and is capped at 100% per tier. The defaults yield approximately 5,000 active users in rollout month one.

UK messaging

Channel Number rental (USD/month) Outbound messages / brief Inbound messages / brief

Provider fee (USD/message) Paid template messages / brief Meta template fee (USD/delivery)

Paid templates are pre-approved outbound WhatsApp messages used when Lance initiates contact outside the user-opened 24-hour service window. The Meta fee is Meta's category- and destination-dependent charge for each delivered template, added to Twilio's provider fee. The editable default is a planning placeholder, not a universal tariff.

AI usage per brief

Model Input tokens Output tokens Input price / 1M tokens— Output price / 1M tokens—

As a rough English-language estimate, one token is about 0.75 words; chat history, profile data and tool results also consume input tokens. Claude Sonnet 5 is modelled at its standard $3/$15 input/output rate.

Plan prices and currency

USD → GBP

Membership prices are moved out of the operational assumptions because they are reference values and unlikely to change during scenario review. 1 USD ≈ £0.7424, calculated from the ECB's 3 August 2026 EUR/USD and EUR/GBP reference rates.

Pilot monthly cost—

Final rollout cost—

First rollout revenue—

Revenue and cost as usage grows

Paired bars compare modeled subscription revenue with attributable messaging, AI and number costs. Hosting is excluded because its later scaling profile is not yet known.

CostRevenue

Month	Active users	Briefs	Cost	Revenue	% rev.

Prices checked 4 Aug 2026: Twilio UK SMS, Twilio WhatsApp, Freelancer Club plans. All values are editable.