What it costs to serve one subscriber
A price a fifth of the going rate invites one question, and it is not how to buy. It is what is wrong with it. The answer is that nothing is wrong with it, and the way to show that is to publish the arithmetic rather than assert the conclusion.
The shape of the cost
Shred delivery has an unusual structure. A provider pays once to receive the feed from the network. Every additional subscriber gets a copy of packets that have already been paid for. Nothing about serving the two hundredth customer is meaningfully different from serving the second, except the bandwidth it takes to reach them.
So the marginal cost of the next customer is egress, plus a share of the machines doing the ingest. That is the whole model.
Where the cost actually goes
Bandwidth is the line everybody assumes dominates, and it is nowhere near the biggest. Running the ingest is the expensive part, and it is a cost that does not grow when another customer is added.
The arithmetic
Against a $100 price that is roughly a 85% gross margin. We are not a charity and have not claimed to be. The hard part of this business is running the ingest reliably, not moving the bytes, and 85% is what it takes to do that properly and keep doing it.
What the market charges against that
Published prices, read on 2026-08-31. The implied margin column assumes the same roughly $14 cost to serve that we pay, which is an assumption about their business rather than a fact about it. If any of these vendors thinks the number is wrong, we will publish theirs.
Send us a correction
If you operate one of these services and our figures are wrong, send us yours and we will publish the correction on this page with your name on it. That offer has no expiry and we have not had to use it yet. sam@shredstream.sh