The $114,000 Question

A 1,000-person professional community using traditional virtual office software pays $120,000 annually. The same community on Cosmos pays $6,000. The difference isn't a pricing trick—it's a fundamental rethinking of how virtual spaces should work.

This isn't about discounts. It's about aligning costs with reality.

Three Pricing Models in Virtual Spaces

1. Per-Member Pricing (The Enterprise Legacy) Gather.town, Kumospace, Tandem, and others inherited their pricing from enterprise SaaS. You pay per registered member, monthly, forever. This made sense for Salesforce in 2005—every salesperson needed a CRM seat. It makes less sense for virtual spaces where attendance varies dramatically.

2. Tiered Flat Pricing (The Compromise) Spatial.chat offers brackets: pay $588 for up to 10 users, $1,188 for up to 50. It's simpler than per-member but creates cliff effects. Your 51st member doubles your bill overnight.

3. Concurrent Capacity Pricing (The Reality Model) Cosmos charges for peak simultaneous users. Not registrations. Not potential. Actual usage. This isn't a discount strategy—it's acknowledging that virtual spaces aren't like traditional software.

The Behavioural Economics of Inclusion

Per-member pricing creates invisible barriers. Every addition becomes a financial decision:

  • Marketing wants to invite 50 clients to a product demo? That's $500/month.

  • HR wants to add 10 summer interns? That's $1,200 for the summer.

  • Sales wants to give prospects trial access? Impossible.

These micro-decisions compound. Teams shrink their virtual spaces to fit budgets, not needs. The virtual office becomes exclusive by economics, not intention.

With concurrent pricing, these decisions vanish. Add the interns. Invite the clients. Include the alumni network. The cost remains unchanged if they don't increase peak usage.

Use Cases That Only Work with Concurrent Pricing

1. Education at Scale: Universities can add all 10,000 students to their virtual campus. With 200 peak concurrent users, they pay for 200, not 10,000. Office hours, study groups, and social spaces become financially viable.

2. Customer Communities: SaaS companies can create customer spaces without calculating ROI per user. A 5,000-person customer community with 100 concurrent users costs the same as a 100-person private workspace.

3. Event Platforms: Conference organisers can sell unlimited tickets without software costs scaling. A 2,000-attendee virtual conference with 300 peak concurrent viewers pays for 300 seats.

4. Hybrid Work Experiments: Companies can add contractors, partners, and clients without budget meetings. Collaboration happens based on value, not accounting.

Our Vision: Virtual Spaces as Public Infrastructure

We believe virtual spaces will become as fundamental as websites. Every organisation, community, and group will have one. But this only works if the economics support inclusion, not exclusion.

Imagine if websites charged per visitor. Most of the internet wouldn't exist. The same principle applies to virtual spaces. Charging per member limits what's possible.

The Standard We're Building

Cosmos isn't trying to be cheaper. We're trying to make virtual spaces work like real spaces:

  • Unlimited capacity for members

  • Costs based on actual usage

  • No penalties for growth

  • Natural, friction-free inclusion

As virtual spaces evolve from "video calling rooms" to "digital spaces", pricing must evolve too.

It's about enabling use cases that don't work under traditional models. The professional communities, educational institutions, and event platforms using Cosmos aren't choosing us because we're cheaper—they're choosing us because we're the only option that makes their vision financially viable.

We're building for a future where every community has a virtual space, every classroom extends online, and every event has a digital venue. This future only works if the economics support abundance, not scarcity.

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