All-in COGS per customer (incl. SLA, ops, compliance)

99.5%

• Single-AZ RDS allowed · single EC2 instance · 7d PITR · best-effort restore
• Cost floor: ~$40-80/mo shared infra (split across many tenants)
• Reality: this is what we run on staging today. Not sellable to anyone with a procurement form.

99.9% (SMB / Growth standard)

• Multi-AZ RDS (×2 cost) · 2× EC2 in separate AZs behind ALB · 30d backup retention · monthly tested restore
• NAT Gateway per AZ ($35/mo each = $70/mo)
• WAF on ALB
• Cost floor: ~$300-500/mo shared infra → ~$15-30/mo per tenant at 15-tenant density

99.95% (Enterprise)

• Everything above PLUS read-replica · automated failover · CloudWatch synthetics
• Dedicated cluster typical (1-3 tenants share)
• Quarterly DR runbook exercise (separate compute cost)

99.99% (regulated / banks)

• Cross-region warm standby (Frankfurt for Dublin primary) · multi-region S3 replication · sub-minute failover
• Dedicated cluster, no sharing
• Real cost: 3-5× pure-AWS line items vs 99.9%

• RDS automated PITR: 7d included up to 100% of allocated storage. Beyond that: $0.095/GB-mo. At our sizes (<20 GB/tenant), effectively free.
• S3 pgdump tier (Business / Enterprise): daily logical dumps, compressed ~25%. Retention per CLAUDE.md (30d Standard / 90d mixed IA).
• Vault snapshot: tiny (~5 MB/tenant compressed), but retention 90d per CLAUDE.md.
• Tested restore: not pay-once-and-forget. Monthly automated restore-test → ephemeral RDS spinup (~$0.50/run × 30) + storage IOPS during restore + engineer time to verify (~30 min × eng hourly).
• Cross-region replication (99.99% only): S3 CRR = ~$0.02/GB transfer + 2× storage cost. Adds ~$10-20/mo per tenant.
• SLA credit reserve: customers expect 10-30% MRR back per hour of downtime past SLA. Industry standard is to reserve ~5% of MRR. Booked as contra-revenue if not used, eaten as cost if invoked.

• Datadog APM + Logs: ~$31/host/mo × 2 hosts/cluster + logs $0.10/GB ingest. Per tenant ~$5-15/mo at 15 tenants/cluster.
• PagerDuty: $21/user × 5 users = $105/mo fixed → split per cluster.
• Sentry: $26-80/mo team plan, mostly fixed.
• WAF: $5/mo + $1/M requests + $1/M analyzed.
• SES: $0.10/1k emails — most tenants <$1/mo.
• You can drop Datadog and live on CloudWatch alone — saves ~$10/tenant/mo but adds eng time to build dashboards. Not recommended above 99.5% SLA.

• SOC2 Type II audit: ~€25k/yr (initial €30-40k, then annual surveillance €20k).
• Annual penetration test: ~€15k for a real one (not a Burp-scan PDF).
• Cyber insurance: €8-15k/yr for €5M coverage (depends on revenue + SOC2 status).
• Vanta or Drata: €8-12k/yr for compliance automation.
• DPO retainer (GDPR Art. 37): €10-15k/yr if outsourced.
• Legal retainer: ~€8k/yr for DPA reviews, MSA updates, vendor T&C.
• ISO 27001 surveillance (if pursued): +€15k/yr.
• Total: ~€80-100k/yr — at 10 customers that's €700-850/mo each. At 100 customers it's €70-85/mo each.
• This is why startup SaaS gross margin looks bad for the first 24 months: fixed compliance overhead doesn't scale with revenue until you have ~50+ customers.

• Light intensity: ~1h eng-support/mo per tenant. Realistic for self-service SMB or IVIP Visibility (read-only, no provisioning ops). At €100/hr loaded cost = €100/mo per tenant.
• Standard intensity: ~4h/mo per tenant. Mid-market Growth — connector debugging, occasional rule tuning, escalations. = €400/mo per tenant.
• Heavy intensity: ~12h/mo per tenant. Enterprise with named TAM, regulated industries with audit-prep support. = €1,200/mo per tenant.
• On-call rotation: 1 eng on rotation × €500/mo standby + ~€200 incident-trigger amortized = baked into the FTE-hour rate.
• Loaded eng hourly = €100/hr — €70k salary + 40% loading (benefits, equipment, office allocation, training) → €100k/yr ÷ 1000 chargeable hours.
• This dominates COGS for small accounts. A €5k/mo Starter that needs 8h/mo of support is unprofitable — fire that customer or move to managed service pricing.

• R&D engineering salaries (separate opex line; not customer-specific).
• Sales & marketing (CAC, commissions, ads).
• Founder / G&A salaries.
• Office, accounting, banking fees.
• One-time onboarding cost (typically 20-80 eng-hours per customer at go-live, amortized over expected contract lifetime should be added if you're modelling LTV).