We are excited to launch a new pricing plan for Squads App.
This update introduces a three-tier model that makes Squads App accessible for all teams building and transacting onchain. Our new pricing aligns with our mission to accelerate the onchain economy and reflects our business model driven by scalable software and our conviction in crypto's exponential growth.
Basic provides teams enterprise-grade security for a one-time .05 SOL deployment fee.
Business unlocks essential features to streamline your team's workflow for just $49 per month.
Enterprise is our tailored offering for teams that need advanced operational setups.
This article explains the thesis and details of our new pricing plan, starting with a summary of how we got here.
The Online Economy Revisited
Software will accelerate and consume the global economy. That is what Marc Andreessen posited in his thesis titled "Why Software Is Eating The World”. It was featured in The Wall Street Journal, lauded by venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs, and mocked by those resigned from the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s. This article was published just thirteen years ago.
Fast-forward to 2024. The online economy has been a rocket ship propelled by the proliferation of software, digital commerce and the growth of the global economy. The internet now accounts for ~20% of global commerce, and technology companies represent ~30% of the world’s stock market.
When you have an exponential curve - propelled by zero-marginal cost, network effects and infinite leverage - how high does it go? Higher. That is now the consensus view for the online economy as our lives move from analog to digital. Software eating the world was obvious in hindsight.
The Rise Of The Onchain Economy
There is a new, parallel economy that’s growing at a rapid pace: the onchain economy.
Onchain rails are transparent, composable, global and permissionless. These unique attributes create a gravitational force that will pull an increasing amount of existing and new economic activity onchain. Vanguards like Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon saw the promise of the internet. We and many others have the same conviction in the onchain economy.
Outside of short-lived bubbles, adoption seems to move at a crawl when observed in real time, but there are tectonic shifts that become obvious in hindsight. Go back to 1H 2023, and Solana was “dead”. Now it competes with Ethereum (including its “aligned” offspring) in volume, fees, developer growth and institutional adoption.
We believe Solana and the SVM will capture an outsized percentage of the growth of the onchain economy. It has the performance, developer talent, teams and culture to do so. Squads is a bet on the onchain economy generally, and the SVM specifically.
The onchain economy unlocks a global, permissionless platform for launching and growing a business. Teams can deploy a permissionless business account in minutes, manage their treasury, execute payroll, distribute vendor payments, earn yield, vest tokens, compose workflows and interact with ecosystem apps.
And now the infrastructure is in place for an inflection point in stablecoin adoption and onchain payments. Teams can on/off ramp through multiple providers, earn yield on dollars with stablecoins issued by firms like PayPal and Circle and accept crypto payments via Stripe and Shopify Checkout.
The Onchain Dilemma
Starting a business is a function of having the right tools. In the onchain economy, infrastructure for managing your onchain assets and operations is critical. Before the proliferation of smart accounts, teams had two options: limited crypto-native solutions or centralized providers.
The crypto-native approach promised transparent self-custody but required deep technical expertise and a nuanced understanding of onchain tools. While a technical user might grasp these concepts, they failed to:
scale with the evolving needs of a business.
appeal to non-technical operators and users.
offer an intuitive interface for team-managed assets and workflows
Consequently, many teams deferred to centralized providers and their MPC key management for a more intuitive, SaaS-like experience. These products were centralized and offchain but they made digital asset management accessible.
High demand (onchain users) coupled with low supply (accessible asset management tools) meant high costs in the form of expensive subscriptions and fees on Assets Under Management (AUM). This business model was justified in its context. Customers were willing to pay a premium for simplicity and reliability during a period when crypto-native software was notorious for its complexity and unpredictability.
A New Onchain Standard
The onchain ecosystem needed a bridge. A bridge that connected the benefits of transparent, programmable onchain infrastructure with the simplicity of centralized services. Smart accounts integrated with intuitive products provide that bridge.
Smart accounts are onchain programs that are self-custodial, programmable and permissionless. There’s no trust in a centralized entity or MPC wallet with opaque algorithms and known limitations (e.g. key revocation).
On Solana, Squads Protocol is the smart account standard trusted by 250+ teams to secure over $10 billion in value.
On top of Squads Protocol, we built an enterprise platform called Squads App to provide teams with an intuitive user interface to manage their onchain operations, including: treasury assets, program upgrade authorities, admin keys, tokens and validator keys.
Squads Protocol is the secure operating system. Squads App is the application that uses that operating system to make asset management intuitive, cost-effective, scalable and secure.
A Pricing Model Based On Growth
Our new pricing plan is based on a three-tier model:
Basic provides teams enterprise-grade security for a one-time .05 SOL deployment fee.
Business unlocks the features you need to streamline your team's workflow for $49 per month.
Enterprise is our tailored offering for teams that need advanced operational setups.
If you have an active subscription, we will extend your account access under the new Business plan terms based on the remaining time and amount you’ve paid. If you prefer a refund of the remaining time period or have any questions please reach out to garrett@sqds.io or message us on 𝕏.
We’ve built Squads App to democratize access to onchain asset management in the same way Shopify has democratized access to launch and scale a global e-commerce business.
Before Shopify, starting and managing an online store was much more expensive than their $29 per month subscription. Their pricing model works because it’s an underwriting decision based on a strong conviction: conviction that lowering the barriers to entry for new online businesses will accelerate the growth and size of the online economy - increasing the size of Shopify’s market and long-term sustainability.
Our new business model was a natural evolution, driven by several key factors:
The easier it is to launch, manage and scale an onchain business the more teams and economic activity will move onchain.
Squads App's self-serve and self-custodial nature eliminates the need for costly enterprise sales teams, elaborate pitch decks, or permissioned onboarding processes, allowing for a more efficient cost structure.
Just as Meta's open-sourcing of Llama 3 democratizes LLM models, Squads Protocol democratizes onchain security. Our business model is based on value-added services that scale with your business, not against it. If you secure 10 million USDC today, you should have 10 million USDC 10 years from now. Fees based on AUM is charging rent for a service (secure onchain custody) that doesn’t reflect the advent of permissionless onchain infrastructure. Alternative solutions let you rent your security, with Squads smart accounts, you own it.
As onchain activity grows, new use cases and user needs will emerge. This model positions us to offer value-added services and enterprise solutions that extend beyond our core offering.
The Evolution Of Onchain Asset Management
Smart accounts are not just an iteration of onchain accounts but a new type of organization. They are sovereign, programmable and permanent assets - a form of onchain real estate that creates the secure foundation for teams, individuals and network states to operate onchain.
Stripe Atlas enables teams to launch an LLC for $500. Squads App enables teams to launch a smart account for 0.05 SOL (the deployment fee). As the onchain economy expands, the parallels between these services will become increasingly clear.
New industries grow by supporting a long tail of companies and use cases. As the onchain economy grows a high churn rate is just as much a positive signal as it is a negative one: the easier it is to start an onchain business, the more failures there will be. And, at the same time, the greater the likelihood of supporting successes.
Our mission is to accelerate the growth of the onchain economy by building software that helps companies launch, manage and grow their onchain business. We are democratizing access to these tools because we believe a bet on growth is how Squads, the SVM and the onchain economy succeed.
Get started with Squads App here!
