Pricing · 2026-05-16
Why we charge $19/mo for what Zapier charges $50/mo for.
A transparent cost breakdown. The TL;DR: we run a fundamentally simpler thing than the workflow tools, on infrastructure that doesn't charge for egress, and we mark up to a reasonable margin instead of an opaque one. That's the whole post, but here are the numbers.
What the Starter plan covers
100,000 events / month, unlimited endpoints, BigQuery + Postgres destinations, dbt generation, Slack drift alerts, replay from R2, email support. That's $19/mo, or $0.19 per 1,000 events.
Compare that to n8n Cloud Pro (200k executions) at $50/mo — actually competitive, but you're running a workflow engine you don't need. Zapier Pro covers 2,000 tasks for $49/mo; at our equivalent volume (100k tasks) you're looking at the Team plan or above and a bill well north of $700/mo. Segment Team starts around $120/mo and bills per-MTU, which our buyer hates.
Our COGS, per workspace, at 100k events
This is the rough cost of serving the median Starter customer. Numbers are Cloudflare + Hookdeck + GCP public pricing, rounded.
| Service | Use | $/mo |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Workers | 200k requests (ingress + writer + observer) | $0.06 |
| Cloudflare Queues | 200k ops · DLQ included | $0.08 |
| Cloudflare R2 | ~3 GB stored, 30-day retention | $0.05 |
| Cloudflare D1 | Workspace metadata, ~50k row reads / writes | $0.10 |
| Cloudflare KV | Encryption keys, ~10k reads | $0.01 |
| Hookdeck (free tier) | Signature verification for first 100k events | $0.00 |
| Resend | Drift alerts + digests | $0.05 |
| Clerk Pro | Auth, prorated per active org | $0.20 |
| Stripe Billing | 0.5% on $19 = ~$0.10 | $0.10 |
| Total COGS | per workspace at 100k events / mo | ~$0.65 |
That gives us a 96% gross margin at Starter pricing, which is plenty for a focused tool with low support overhead and no salespeople. We could probably charge less and still be profitable — and we may, once we get past the design-partner phase — but $19 is also the price-point that signals "real product" to the analyst buyer. Free tools get neglected; $19 doesn't.
What we're not doing
The workflow tools are fundamentally more expensive because:
- They run general-purpose code per event. Each "task" can do anything — call an API, branch, transform. That's expensive compute. Hooktopus runs three Workers, each with a fixed, narrow job. Per-event cost is fractions of a cent.
- They store everything by default. Run history for debugging, input/output for every step. We archive raw events for 30 days and call it done.
- They pay egress. Most run on AWS or GCP, where outbound bytes cost money. We run on Cloudflare; R2 is egress-free.
- They've got salespeople. No knock — that's how the workflow category sells. Hooktopus is self-serve through Business tier; sales calls don't start until $300/mo.
What "honest pricing" means here
You'll see those same numbers above in our footer math when we publish quarterly cost reports. If Hookdeck raises prices, our costs go up; we may have to raise yours. If R2 gets cheaper, we'll pass it through. Either way, our pricing isn't a black box — it's the cost of running a few Cloudflare services plus a reasonable margin.
What we can't sustain
At higher tiers (Pro+), Hookdeck's pricing curves bend up. We've applied for their startup discount. If we don't get it, the v1.5 plan is to migrate Pro+ customers to our own ingress signature checks for the top ~30 sources. The honest version of that conversation will happen in a future blog post.
A note on Free
10k events / month, free forever. Not a trial. Not "free if you accept ads." It's a real product tier with the full dbt generator, drift alerts, and BigQuery destination. We can sustain it because COGS at 10k events is something like 6¢ per workspace per month — call it a customer-acquisition tax. The data team that uses it for a side project today is the team that buys Starter when their main pipeline goes to production.
Try it
You can have a Stripe webhook landing in BigQuery in under 15 minutes from hooktopus.io. Free tier covers any reasonable evaluation.
— Kyle