Transparency report

Where your €5 actually goes.

Nobody likes a subscription. So here is every euro of ours, in the open.

What has to be paid, every month€4,375
Building & running it €1,290 Tax €585 Rent, food, health €2,500
That works out at around 1,200 subscribers. We are not there yet.

What's on this page

Step one

€5 arrives. €3.65 survives.

Two people get paid before we do: the taxman, and whoever handles the card payment. Neither of them is optional, and neither of them negotiates with someone our size.

VAT, 19% in Germany, 17 to 27% depending on where you live Card and payment processing What reaches SoundZapper

Card fees hurt most on small amounts, because a chunk of the fee is the same no matter how big the payment is. Paying once a year instead of twelve times means eleven fewer of those. That is the whole reason the yearly plan is cheaper. It is not a trick to tie you in.

Step two

What it costs to keep the lights on.

None of this is glamorous. It is the dull, recurring bill that arrives whether anyone subscribes that month or not.

Every monthCost

The AI that listens to sounds

Every preset gets listened to by a machine so you can search for how something sounds instead of guessing from its name. This is the big one.		 €700

Servers and downloads

Keeping the catalogue online and getting your downloads to you quickly wherever you are.		 €330

Making the tutorials

Video editing software, sample packs, and the plugins we actually use in the videos.		 €130

Emails that arrive

Sending you a download link and knowing it did not land in spam.		 €105

Stopping Windows calling us a virus

Windows and macOS want proof an app is from a real person. That proof costs money every month.		 €25
Running costs€1,290
AI and models Servers and downloads Making tutorials Emails Windows and Mac trust, €25
355
subscribers at €5, just to pay the tools
€0
paid to anyone for their time at that point
Step three

And then somebody has to live.

SoundZapper is made in Munich, which is not a cheap city. The basics come to roughly €2,500 a month:

No car, no office, no salaries beyond one person.

But €2,500 in your pocket is not €2,500 earned. Two taxes come off before you ever see it.

Profit needed before tax€3,085 / month
Income tax, about €6,400 a year at this level−€535
Munich trade tax, what Munich charges on top, after the tax-free amount−€33
Actually left to live on€2,500

The Munich tax looks tiny here only because most of it gets knocked off the income tax again. Without that, a one-person operation in this city would not add up.

~1,200
subscribers at €5 before tools and one modest living are covered
~355
of those go to the bills before anyone eats

The whole climb, at €5 a head

01,200 subscribers

Twelve hundred people. That is the real number, and we are nowhere near it yet. Which is the honest reason this page exists. Not as a complaint, but so you know what you are part of when you subscribe early.

Why a subscription

The alternative is worse, and you have already lived through it.

We could sell SoundZapper once, for a lot. That is the model most audio software still uses, and you know how it ends, because it has happened to you.

Sell it once for €150

  • Most producers cannot justify €150 up front, so far fewer ever try it.
  • The money arrives once and stops. The costs on this page keep arriving every month.
  • Eighteen months later the only way to get paid again is to ship version 2 and quietly stop updating version 1.
  • A new Windows or macOS update lands, something breaks, and the fix sits behind an €80 upgrade. Then the next one.

Nobody announces that plan. It just happens, every time.

€5 a month

  • Cheap enough to actually start. No €150 decision to agonise over.
  • Cancel whenever you like. If we stop earning it, you stop paying.
  • That is a better guarantee than any promise we could write on this page.
  • Predictable income is the only thing that funds continuous updates instead of a paid rewrite every other year.

Subscription vs. buying a licence, over three years

Same three years in every row. Drawn to scale, so you can compare what each one actually costs you.

Subscription, yearly3 × €50
Subscription, monthly36 × €5
Perpetual licencethe usual plugin deal: €150, then an €80 upgrade 18 months in

Over the same three years: €230 to own it, €150 to subscribe. The subscription is not the expensive option, it is the cheaper one, and in month 36 it is still getting updates instead of waiting for you to buy the next version.

Think of the plugins you bought outright. How many still get fixed, and still run on the machine you use today? "Buy it once" usually means "buy it again in two or three years": the updates stop, your computer moves on, and you pay anyway. We would rather charge a little, continuously, and keep the thing alive than charge a lot, once, and need you to re-buy it to stay funded.

A subscription at this size isn't a revenue strategy. It's the thing that lets a small studio keep shipping rather than disappear.

Where this goes next

What the next hundred subscribers actually buy.

Once the bills are paid, every subscription goes straight back into the thing: more sounds in the library, faster searching, and the features people keep asking for. We put what everyone has asked for on a public list, so you can watch your €5 turn into something.

Figures on this page are rounded monthly averages for 2026 and will change as we grow. We'll update them here rather than quietly let them drift. VAT varies by country, so your exact split depends on where you live. Questions about any line on this page are welcome, and we'll answer them.