Business Growth

The 50/50 split isn't generous — it's necessary

Why Oanie keeps 50% of partner revenue, why partners getting 50% beats every SaaS reseller deal, and the cost stack that explains both.

Two interlocking geometric forms split down the middle

Every prospective Oanie partner asks the same question on the discovery call. "Why 50/50? Why not 70/30 in my favor? White-label SaaS deals are usually 80/20."

Fair question. Here's the truthful answer, with the cost stack that backs it up.

What you're actually getting

A partner closes a $899 website + $39/month hosting. They paid $0 in setup. They didn't buy a server. They didn't hire a developer. They didn't license a CMS. They didn't build the scraping infrastructure. They didn't train an LLM. They didn't write the legal terms. They didn't set up payment processing or VAT compliance or RODO/GDPR consent flows.

What they did was: pick up the phone, send a link, close a deal. That's the entire scope of partner work.

Our cost stack on a single $899 sale

  • Compute (AI preview generation, image gen, video gen, agent runs): ~$3.40
  • Hosting infrastructure (bare metal Hetzner, prorated across active sites): ~$1.10/month per site
  • Domain registration markup absorbed: ~$2 / sale on average
  • Payment processing (Stripe 2.5% + $0.30): ~$22.78 on $899
  • Customer-success / fraud / support burden: ~$45 / sale (averaged across closes + churn + edge cases)
  • Engineering time: the platform ships ~3 new modules / month, fixes ~50 bugs, maintains ~30 integrations. Amortized per sale at our current volume: ~$80
  • Trust + safety, GDPR/RODO compliance, EU AI Act provenance metadata, accessibility audits: ~$15 / sale amortized

Total direct + amortized cost: ~$169 on a $899 sale. Plus ongoing hosting at $1.10/month forever.

Leaves a gross margin of ~$280 to the platform side after we cut you the partner's 50%. That margin pays for:

  • The two engineers building new modules week-over-week
  • The on-call rotation when a server actually dies
  • The legal review for every new country we enter
  • The 90-day reserve we hold against chargebacks
  • The R&D budget for the AI roadmap that keeps our previews ahead of competitors

Why 80/20 doesn't work

The SaaS reseller comparison breaks down because SaaS resellers don't have product liability. They sell a license to someone else's product, take their cut, and walk away.

Oanie carries the product. When a client's site goes down at 2 AM, our pager goes off. When a payment fails, our system retries it. When the EU passes a new AI disclosure law, our legal team rewrites the consent UI. The partner doesn't carry any of that.

If we ran a thinner margin — 70/30 in your favor — we'd have to cut engineering, support, or trust-and-safety. All three would degrade the product partners are selling, which would tank conversion, which would tank partner income. The math doesn't work.

Why 50/50 in the partner's favor still wins

Compare to the real alternatives:

  1. Build it yourself. Hire two engineers ($180k/year minimum each in any developed market), buy a year of runway to ship MVP, learn AI infra the hard way. Maybe shipped in 18 months. We did this. It was brutal.
  2. Resell a SaaS site builder. Squarespace/Wix don't pay you 50%. Squarespace's affiliate is 20% of one year of subscription. On a $200 annual plan, that's $40 — once. Not per site. Not recurring. Compared to your $449.50 per close + ongoing hosting commission, you're earning 11x more per customer with us.
  3. Pure agency model with WordPress / Webflow. You're now competing against every freelancer in your city, your prices race to the bottom, and your margin is the same after you pay yourself for delivery hours.

What 50/50 buys you that nothing else does

  • A finished product you can sell on Monday
  • Ongoing platform development you didn't fund
  • Infrastructure that you don't have to maintain
  • A legal and compliance shield for every market
  • Recurring hosting MRR that compounds for years

That's the deal. It's not generous — generous would be an unsustainable business that disappeared in two years and stranded you. 50/50 is the smallest split that lets us keep building, keep shipping, and keep our partners earning into the next decade.

If that's the answer you wanted to hear, apply. If it's not, find a SaaS reseller deal at 20% of one year of subscription and report back in two years on how that went.