Finance

Pricing Model

Pricing Philosophy

• Single tier simplicity: One price, one service level. No decision fatigue for customers.
• No upfront charge: The complimentary first month (30 days) and $0 setup fee remove all friction from onboarding.
• Premium positioning: $299/month reflects concierge-level pickup, storage, and delivery — not self-storage.

Stripe Integration

Billing Flow

1. Customer signs up via portal (portal.mystoragevalet.com)
2. Stripe Checkout creates a subscription with a 30-day trial (complimentary first month)
3. Webhook confirms subscription status back to Supabase
4. After trial, $299/month auto-charges

Known Issues

• Resolved (Feb 10, 2026): Payment timestamps were NULL for all customer profiles. Fixed by backfill migration 20251219000001 + stripe-webhook v4.1. Verified: 0 NULL last_payment_at values remain.
• Legacy schema fields (setup_fee_paid, setup_fee_amount) exist but are unused since setup fee elimination

Tax Strategy

Tax strategy documentation covers equipment deductions, home office considerations, and vehicle/mileage tracking for the storage logistics operation. Detailed strategy is maintained in Documents (iCloud-synced) under Finance/Tax/.

Key Considerations

• Equipment and storage supplies as business deductions
• Vehicle/mileage tracking for pickup and delivery operations
• Software subscriptions (Supabase, Vercel, Stripe, Calendly, etc.)
• Home office deduction (if applicable)

Financial Model

The canonical financial model lives in Google Drive as a Google Sheets-compatible spreadsheet. It covers 24-month projections with unit economics for the Hudson County launch market.

Key Metrics

Dynamic Calculator

The Dynamic Calculator is the scenario model spanning Storage Valet operations and finance. It is used internally to test decisions — raising the price, leasing more space, paying a larger referral bounty, pushing partner properties harder — and is designed to be shared with investors and prospective investors. Every figure on screen derives from visible assumptions, so any input can be challenged and the whole model responds immediately.

Location: Documents/storagevalet/Finance/Dynamic-Calculator/. Read that folder's README.md before changing the tool; it carries the goals, architecture, operational model, data provenance, and open items. Current version is SV_Dynamic_Calculator_v3.html — a single self-contained HTML file with no build step, dependencies, or backend.

What it models

• Unit economics — a per-member waterfall from the membership fee down to margin.
• Acquisition — cost per member by channel (organic, partner properties, referrals, paid), lifetime value, LTV:CAC, and payback period, including the cost of the complimentary trial.
• Volume, space, and coverage — volume per member against the plan allowance, warehouse capacity, inventory trend, and coverage exposure.
• Service load — truck visits per member split by type, items batched per visit, and the savings from combining a pickup and a return into one visit.
• Projection and scenarios — 24 months of members, revenue, profit, and cash; a price ladder; a ranking of which assumptions move the bottom line most; and named scenarios for side-by-side comparison.

Modelling rules

The cost engine is visit-based, not job-based, mirroring what the portal records: many items ride one visit, so cost is a per-visit base plus per-item handling. A visit marked mixed serves a pickup and a return in one trip and removes a whole visit from the schedule; container_delivery is a separate trip to drop empty containers ahead of a pickup. Member inventory is dynamic rather than fixed, and onboarding is a one-time cost falling inside the complimentary trial.

Two accounting rules must be preserved. First, warehouse rent is treated as fixed in the profit and loss view, while unit economics separately charge each member only the marginal space they consume — charging space in both places double-counts it. Second, retention is entered as average tenure and churn is derived from it, not the reverse.

Commercial terms in the model are read from the plans table and are authoritative: $299 per month, complimentary first month (30-day trial), no setup fee, $2,000 included coverage, a 200 cubic foot allowance, 48-hour lead time, and a warning to the member at 80% of allowance. All other inputs are planning assumptions by design, not reported actuals.

Accounting & Invoicing

Financial records are organized in Documents (iCloud-synced) across three top-level folders:

• Finance/ — All monetary records:
  • Accounting/ — General accounting documents
  • Receipts/ — Purchase receipts
  • Statements/ — Bank and card statements
  • Invoices/ — Vendor invoices
  • Tax/ — Tax strategy and filings
  • Stripe/ — Stripe-specific billing documentation
• Legal/ — Entity filings, payment structure options, EIN documentation
• Insurance/ — Business and personal insurance policies, warranties