A complete buildout costs your agency $500 a month wholesale. Sell it at $1,500 and you keep $1,000 on every client. Here is the full margin math at each tier, what quietly eats it, and the kind of client the numbers never work on.
Lumina8 min read
Here is the arithmetic, before the argument. A complete buildout costs your agency $500 a month wholesale. Your platform subscription is $49 a month, flat, no matter how many clients you have. If you sell that buildout at $1,500 a month, you keep $1,000 on the first client and $1,000 on every client after it, because the $49 is already paid for. That is a 66 percent gross margin on recurring revenue with no build invoice to recover first.
The rest of this post is the part a pricing page leaves out. What the numbers look like at the lower tiers, what eats the margin, and the kind of client none of it works on.
What do you actually pay Lumina?
Two separate things, and people mix them up constantly.
The first is your workspace. $49 a month for the agency dashboard, the live demo site on your subdomain, the client portal, fulfillment access, and onboarding help. It includes 100 live voice minutes, 500 chat messages, and 50 website audits a month for your demos. Those allowances are for selling, not for your clients' production systems. You pay it whether you have zero clients or twenty.
Tier One, $225 a month. Custom site, AI chatbot, lead nurture, online booking, review engine.
Tier Two, $275 a month. Tier One plus SEO.
Top Tier, $500 a month. Everything above plus Voice AI.
Single services run $40 to $350 a month if you want to assemble something narrower. Voice AI alone is $350. A website build is $60. A review engine is $40. Bigger work, automations, SaaS builds, mobile apps, gets scoped on a call.
Those are the prices you pay us. They are not prices your client ever sees. What you charge is your decision, and we wrote a whole post on how to set that retail number.
What does the margin look like at each tier?
Run it at three plausible retail prices. Cost is the wholesale monthly; the $49 platform fee sits outside this because it does not scale with client count.
You sell
Your cost
You keep
Gross margin
Tier One at $797
$225
$572
72%
Tier Two at $997
$275
$722
72%
Top Tier at $1,497
$500
$997
67%
Top Tier at $2,497
$500
$1,997
80%
Two things fall out of that table.
Margin percentage barely moves between tiers, but dollars per client do. Three Tier One clients at $797 produce $1,716 a month in gross profit. One Top Tier client at $2,497 produces $1,997, from one demo call, one onboarding, one relationship to keep warm. That is the argument for leading with the complete buildout instead of the cheap entry package. It is also why the Top Tier exists: bought line by line, those same services add up to $745 a month, so the package saves you $245 before you mark anything up.
The second thing: your first client pays for the year. One Tier One client at $797 retail covers your $49 subscription on day one and leaves $523 a month. There is no month where you are thousands of dollars into a build, waiting on a delivery date to invoice against, because there is no build fee to front. That is the structural difference, and it is worth more than the margin percentage. We argued the case for dropping the build fee entirely in a separate post.
What eats the margin?
Gross margin is not profit. Four things come out of it before anything reaches you.
Your time on the sale. A demo call, a follow-up, a proposal, maybe a second call. Call it three hours for a deal you win and one hour for each you lose. At a 25 percent close rate that is six hours of your own time for every client you land. It is not a line on an invoice. It is still the scarcest thing you own, and it is why a $297 a month client is usually a bad trade.
Add-ons you forgot to reprice. HIPAA compliance is $500 a month wholesale. Sell a med spa or a dental practice a Top Tier buildout with HIPAA and your cost is $1,000, not $500. If your retail price did not move, your margin just halved. AI quality assurance on voice calls is another $100 a month. Domain registration is a one-time $20. Check the add-on column before you quote.
Clients who need more than the system gives them. Most do not. Some do. The custom quote services, automations, SaaS, mobile apps, paid ads, exist because a real client sometimes wants something the packages do not carry, and those get scoped and priced individually rather than absorbed.
Churn. This is the big one. A client you keep for three months at $997 retail produced $2,166 of gross profit. The same client kept for two years produced $17,328. Your margin on paper is identical. The business is not remotely the same. If you have not read it, why AI clients cancel is the more important post than this one.
Is it cheaper to build the stack yourself?
Cheaper on paper, sometimes. Not once you count your own hours.
The raw inputs are not expensive. Vapi charges $0.05 a minute for hosting and passes model and voice costs through at cost, quoting transcription around $0.0095 a minute and ElevenLabs voice at $0.0146 to $0.0238. Their own worked example puts 1,000 minutes a month at $82 to $129 all in. OpenAI lists gpt-live-1 voice sessions at $0.05 a minute, with realtime audio tokens at $32 per million in and $64 per million out. We broke the per-minute question down properly in what a voice AI agent costs per minute.
So the model cost of answering a small business's phone is dollars, not hundreds of dollars. That is true and it is the thing people wave around when they say white-label is a ripoff.
What it leaves out: the prompt work per trade, the booking integration, the calendar write-back, the failure handling when the calendar API times out, the website, the SEO, the review requests, the nurture sequence, the client portal, and the person who fixes it at 6pm when the agent starts mishandling a transfer. Platform fees for that layer are not trivial either. GoHighLevel publishes $97, $297, and $497 a month for its agency plans, with the white-label mobile app as a separate $497 a month add-on and HIPAA at $297. Vapi's HIPAA add-on is $2,000 a month.
Build it yourself and your margin is higher per client and your capacity is lower per week. That is the trade. Our honest read: build your own when you have an engineer whose time is otherwise idle, and buy when your constraint is selling hours. Most one-to-five person agencies are selling-constrained.
Who should not do this?
The margin math assumes a client who can pay four figures a month. Plenty cannot.
UENI published onboarding data from 7,413 small businesses counted on 10 August 2026, asking what they planned to spend monthly on marketing. Only 3.8 percent said $500 or more. Adding in the businesses planning nothing at all, 90.5 percent said under $200 a month. It is self-selected toward small budgets and it measures intent rather than spend, and UENI says so themselves. Even discounted, the shape is clear: the median micro-business is not your buyer and never will be.
Your buyer is the slice above that line. A business that already pays for software it does not think twice about. Housecall Pro's published plans run $79 to $329 a month on monthly billing for field service software. An HVAC company paying that, running four trucks, missing calls during August peak, is a buyer. A solo handyman planning $50 a month on marketing is not, and no demo will change that.
Two other cases where this does not fit. If you want a one-time project fee and no ongoing relationship, the model is wrong for you, because the margin here is recurring by construction. And if you are not willing to run the demo call yourself, none of the arithmetic matters, because nothing closes on a link alone.
FAQ
Does the $49 platform fee scale with the number of clients?
No. It is one flat subscription for your agency workspace regardless of how many clients you are fulfilling. Fulfillment is billed per client, per service, at the wholesale rates. Your usage allowances of 100 voice minutes, 500 chat messages, and 50 audits cover your demos, not your clients' live systems.
When does billing on a fulfillment order actually start?
Submitting a request does not charge you. Billing starts when we start building. That matters for cash flow, because you can scope and submit before the client's first payment clears.
What happens if I hit my demo usage cap mid-month?
The live parts pause and everything else keeps working. Your prospect sees a neutral message saying the demo is not accepting calls right now. They never see a billing notice or a plan name, and there is no metered invoice on any plan. Full detail is in the FAQ.
Can I mark up the add-ons too?
Yes. Add-ons are wholesale prices like everything else. The mistake is not marking them up, it is forgetting to move your retail price when you add one. HIPAA at $500 a month wholesale will quietly erase your margin on a $997 retail deal.
What if I cancel?
Nothing is deleted. Published demos unpublish so the links stop serving, and what you built stays as a draft. You keep access with zero voice, chat, and audits until you resubscribe.
The next step
Open the full services and pricing page and price one real deal, a business you have already spoken to. Write down the tier, the add-ons that trade actually needs, the wholesale total, and the retail number you would say out loud on a call without flinching. Subtract. If the gap is under $500 a month, either the tier is wrong or the client is.
Then start the workspace and build that prospect's demo before you call them. The $49 price goes up on 1 October 2026, and the rate you join at is the one you keep.
