The price offer
Requirement 4: prepare a price offer. The project's answer is not a quote for a box but a market: owners are paid for the disk and CPU their boxes share, buyers pay for what they use, and the platform keeps a fee. The software for it is finished end to end; opening it needs a registered business to stand behind the Stripe platform, which comes after the matriculation.
What is sold
| Kind | Unit | What the buyer gets |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | GiB-month | A replicated volume of that size on the mesh, for 30 days |
| Compute | vCPU-hour | Scheduling on the seller's box, inside its window, for 30 days |
A box can list only what it already shares: storage while it is enrolled in the mesh, compute while it also shares compute. Stop sharing and the listing leaves the shelf.
How the money moves
- A seller onboards: the edge creates a Stripe Express account for the box, tagged with the box's identifier, and returns Stripe's hosted onboarding.
- Stripe reports the account can receive transfers; only then can the seller list.
- A buyer orders units. The edge reserves them and creates a Stripe Checkout session as a destination charge: the buyer pays the platform, the sale is forwarded to the seller's account, the fee stays.
- Stripe reports the payment; the order is
paidand fulfilled: a namespace and a volume claim on the mesh for storage, a ledger credit for compute.
The fee is 4 % of the gross amount (400 basis points, capped at 20 %), rounded half up: on a 20.00 EUR sale the platform keeps 0.80 and the seller receives 19.20. Prices are in cents of one currency per edge; an order is at least 0.50 EUR, Stripe's floor. Money never touches a box.
What a company pays
A company running its own edge shares among its own boxes for free; the market is not available to it, by design. What it buys is the setup: the boxes, the edge, and the installation. That offer, with a reproducible deployment script and an operator's walkthrough, is being written as the edge discovery work lands, and will be priced once the business exists.
Why no bill of materials
A LosOS box is a repurposed mini-PC; the hardware is whatever the owner has or buys second-hand, and the software is free. The thing that has a price is the capacity owners share with each other, and the platform that makes sharing it safe. That is what the market prices.