Business & operations

The model, the money, the metrics that would tell us to stop, and the legal obligations that gate launch. emealia is a one-person product with a fixed cost base measured in tens of euros a month — which is a real strategic asset, because it makes the honest positioning affordable.

Pricing and infrastructure figures are August 2026 · AI cost model from the 2026-07-07 analysis, updated to the shipped model choice

The model

Pricing

Against the field

Why credit-based, not time-based

The trial grants N free AI estimates (default 30, held in runtime admin config and changeable at any time) rather than a 168-hour countdown. Three reasons:

• A hard estimate cap prevents API farming in a way a timer cannot.
• It lets a casual logger test at their own pace. Someone who logs three times a week gets ten weeks; a timer would have expired before they formed a view.
• It removes time pressure entirely — a wellbeing property, consistent with the ED-safety posture.

Credits are granted at the first real estimation, not at signup, and no card is taken up front. A multi-meal batch costs one credit, not one per meal.

Other pricing rules

• Annual is the default in checkout, with a secondary monthly toggle.
• Prices are never hardcoded in any screen — every placeholder is filled from the backend prices object.
• Stripe Tax is enabled: EU VAT (DE 19%) and US sales tax, with valid invoices.
• No win-back discounts. A price that changes when you try to leave is the mechanic this product exists to be the opposite of. Make one-tap cancellation visible and say so.
• Same model in trial and paid. No trial-only downgrade — see below.

Unit economics

The model choice, and why there is no trial downgrade

The July analysis recommended downgrading trial users to a cheaper model to cap variable COGS. That recommendation was rejected, and the reasoning is worth keeping. AI estimation error is roughly 25–35% on mixed dishes on any model — a flagship buys no honest accuracy at this task. So a downgrade would save a fraction of a cent while making the trial worse than the paid product the user is being asked to buy. Same model throughout, at ~$0.004 per estimate.

Token throughput

The output ceiling scales with the multi-meal segment cap (8 × ~1,400 measured per-meal tokens). max_tokens is a ceiling, not a bill — real cost scales with segments actually emitted — but truncation must fail loudly rather than silently retry billed calls, after an incident where a flat ceiling truncated a single-meal response.

Infrastructure

Total fixed cost including third-party services is ~$56–63/month at 100 users, which is what puts break-even at 13–15 paying subscribers. This is a strategic asset: a product that breaks even at fifteen customers can afford to refuse the revenue mechanics — paywall creep, win-back discounts, data brokerage — that its competitors depend on.

KPIs

North star: weekly active loggers with ≥4 logging days per week. Not meals, not weight change, not time in app.

Kill conditions

Pre-committed responses, written down before the data arrives so they cannot be rationalised away afterwards.

Compliance

GDPR

• EU region (eu-central-1), one AI processor, a signed DPA. No fan-out to a second model provider — deliberately, and it is the reason semantic caching was rejected.
• Data is never sold. No ad SDKs. "DSGVO-konform, kein Datenverkauf" is used actively as a German marketing argument.
• A consent ledger with separate consent types — body data and weight are already separated. Mood data needs its own, on the same Art. 9 logic, erasable independently and excluded from any AI context the consent does not cover.
• Export as a feature, not a checkbox. Mandated anyway; presenting it as "your data leaves whenever you want" counters lock-in and reinforces the privacy position at zero cost.
• Erasure covers weight entries and all derived summaries.

EU AI Act — Article 50

Medical positioning — EU MDR, FDA, German HWG

Blocked on legal counsel (H10)

emealia is positioned as a general-wellness / informational product — not a medical device and not medical advice, resting on the EU MDR general-wellness exemption and the FDA General Wellness policy, and staying clear of the German HWG by making no disease-treatment or prevention claim anywhere.

Terms pending sign-off: informational and educational purposes only · general wellness · not a medical device · not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate or prevent any disease · no doctor–patient relationship · no reliance.

Counsel decides three things: whether an explicit acknowledgment checkbox is needed at registration, the exact lawful basis for any Art. 9 health data that lands in the free-text context field (a disclaimer does not switch off Art. 9), and the final wording. Draft copy and placements are in Design.

Subscription law

The FTC reopened click-to-cancel rulemaking in March 2026 and roughly 30 US states have their own auto-renewal laws. emealia's no-win-back-discount policy already exists; the remaining work is to make one-tap cancellation visible and say so publicly. Against Noom's >1,200 BBB cancellation complaints and MyFitnessPal's class action, cancellation is a marketing feature rather than a compliance chore.

Anti-abuse posture

Open founder actions

These cannot be delegated. Everything else in the plan is unblocked around them, per the "0.0 is a paradigm, not a blocker" rule — build against fakes and placeholders until a real setup is genuinely needed.

Governance

• AI never merges its own pull request. A human review checkbox is always required.
• The implementation plan is the single source of truth for what gets built — it replaced the GitHub issue backlog. Every story carries explicit dependencies and satisfies a Definition of Ready so any unblocked story can be picked up cold.
• Human dependencies live in one place (story 0.0) and are treated as a rulebook for how to keep building without spending money, not as a queue of blockers.
• Non-negotiables outrank opportunities. When a market move and a non-negotiable conflict, the non-negotiable wins and the conflict gets written down.