See what reselling web hosting actually pays after your plan, card fees and churn.

Most reseller calculators multiply your client count by your monthly price and call the result your earnings. That number is your revenue. It ignores your own hosting bill, the cut your payment processor takes on every invoice — typically 2.9% plus 30 cents — the clients who leave during the year, and every hour you spend on support.

This calculator subtracts the cash costs and reports the time separately, as an hourly rate. It works with any provider's pricing, not just ours.

What this calculator does

You enter three numbers: how many client sites you host, what you charge for each per month, and what your own reseller plan costs. It returns your monthly profit with every deduction itemised, your profit per site, and the number of clients you need before the plan pays for itself.

Open the optional fields and it adds two things nobody else models. Enter your support hours per site and it divides your profit by the hours behind it, giving you an effective hourly rate. Enter your annual churn and it recalculates twelve-month profit against a shrinking client base rather than assuming everyone stays.

Why gross revenue misleads you

Reseller hosting has an unusual cost structure, and it produces a specific illusion.

Your hosting plan is nearly fixed. Whether you host 5 sites or 50, it costs roughly the same, so at any reasonable scale it lands around 5% of revenue. Divide revenue by hosting cost and the margin looks extraordinary — 90% and up. That figure is real, and it is also the least useful number in the business.

What actually determines whether reselling is worth doing is the cost that scales with every client you add: support. Hosting cost is fixed and shrinks as a proportion of revenue. Support time is linear and never does. Ten clients at 30 minutes each is five hours a month. A hundred clients is fifty. That is the constraint, and gross margin hides it completely.

What the numbers usually reveal

• Low price points fail on fees before they fail on anything else. At $5 per site per month, monthly card processing takes 8.9% of revenue. At $25 it takes 4.1%. The fixed 30 cents per transaction is regressive, and it is why cheap monthly billing is the worst combination in this business.
• Price moves profit far more than client count does. Going from 25 clients to 75 at the same price roughly triples both your revenue and your support hours, leaving your hourly rate flat. Raising the price on the 25 you already have changes it immediately.
• A reasonable-looking side income can pay badly per hour. Profit of $340 a month reads well until you divide it by 25 hours of support and get $13.60.
• Churn quietly resets your baseline. Losing a fifth of your clients over a year means your twelve-month total reflects an average book noticeably smaller than the one you started with.
• Annual billing beats a price rise for fee efficiency. One yearly invoice instead of twelve removes eleven fixed transaction fees per client.

Who this is for

• Web designers and agencies deciding whether to host clients themselves or keep referring them out.
• Freelancers setting a price for a care plan and needing to know what survives the deductions.
• Existing resellers checking whether their current pricing has kept pace with their support load.
• Anyone comparing reseller plans across providers, where the difference between plans matters less than the difference between $12 and $25 per site.

How to use it

1. Enter your client sites and what you charge per site each month. If you're starting out, use one of the presets.
2. Enter your own reseller plan cost, or load ChemiCloud's. 
3. Open the optional fields and enter your support hours per site — even a rough estimate. This produces the profit per support hour, which is the number most worth knowing.
4. Adjust the processing rate if you're outside the US or not on Stripe's standard pricing. The 2.9% + $0.30 default is US card pricing; rates in the UK, EU or other regions might be different.
5. Set churn to match your own retention, then read the twelve-month profit.

What the results mean

You collect — gross revenue. Client sites multiplied by your monthly price, before any deduction.

Hosting plan — your own reseller bill. Fixed, regardless of how many clients sit on it.

Card processing — percentage fee on the total plus a fixed fee per invoice. The fixed portion is why low prices and monthly billing combine badly.

Profit per site — monthly profit divided by client count. What one client is worth to you after costs.

What your time earns (Profit per support hour) — monthly profit divided by total support hours. Your time isn't deducted from profit, so fewer hours per client raises this figure rather than lowering it. That's the point: it measures what each hour you do spend is returning.

Profit over 12 months — the annual total against a client base shrinking at your churn rate, averaged across the year. Your hosting plan is charged all twelve months regardless.

Covers your plan cost — how many clients you need before your reseller plan pays for itself. Cash only; it doesn't account for your time.

A note on method

Cash costs — your hosting plan, payment processing, lost clients — are subtracted from profit. Your time is not.

That's deliberate. Assigning your hours a market wage and deducting it would show most reselling operations running at a loss, which is both bad accounting and useless advice. A designer building this on evenings isn't giving up billable work at the margin. So time appears as a rate instead: profit divided by hours, letting you compare it against whatever your time is genuinely worth.

If the rate comes out low, the answer is usually to raise prices or reduce support load — not to add more clients at the same price.