F09 — Scale Economics
One Million, Five Million, Ten Million Users
This page answersDoes this business get better as it gets bigger?
Fixed operating cost is stepped up with each tier rather than held flat, so operating leverage is shown honestly.
Assumptions are shared across every financial page — change one, all outputs recalculate.
112–114 — Scale ladder
The same assumptions at four user scales
| Users | Revenue | Recurring | Gross profit | Fixed opex | EBITDA | EBITDA margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 250,000 | US$26.1M | US$17.7M | US$20.4M | US$22.0M | US$-1.6M | -6.2% |
| 1,000,000 | US$54.3M | US$20.7M | US$42.4M | US$22.0M | US$20.4M | 37.5% |
| 5,000,000 | US$204.8M | US$36.5M | US$159.7M | US$52.8M | US$106.9M | 52.2% |
| 10,000,000 | US$392.8M | US$56.2M | US$306.4M | US$79.2M | US$227.2M | 57.8% |
Operating leverage
Revenue and EBITDA by tier
Revenue
MODEL OUTPUTEBITDA
MODEL OUTPUTAdjust
Drivers of scale economics
Cost structure
ASSUMPTIONWhat does not improve with scale
- · Payment processing and merchant payout costs are volume-linear, not fixed.
- · Merchant verification is manual at the margin and rises with merchant count.
- · Support cost per transacting user falls slowly and never reaches zero.
- · CAC typically rises with scale as cheaper channels saturate — modelled on the acquisition page.
Fixed cost is stepped at 2.4× above one million users and 3.6× above five million. Those multipliers are ASSUMPTIONS; a reader who believes headcount scales differently should discount these outputs accordingly.
Investor implication
Operating leverage is real but not unlimited. The margin improvement between one and ten million users comes overwhelmingly from recurring merchant and subscription revenue, not from transaction volume.