Cost Compration

Year 1 Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

The following table estimates the realistic costs of launching a production-grade exchange in the first year.

Category	Option A: Build In-House (Open Source Fork)	Option B: Orderbook.trade (SaaS)
Engineering Team	$300,000 (2 Backend + 1 Blockchain Dev)	$0 (Handled by orderbook.trade)
Security Audits	$50,000 (Initial Smart Contract Audit)	$0 (Contracts Pre-Audited)
Infrastructure	$24,000 ($2k/mo: RPCs, Indexers, Relayers)	$0 (Included)
Maintenance	$???,??? (Panic fixes, upgrades, downtime)	$0 (SLA Guaranteed)
Liquidity Seeding	$60,000 (Retainers for Market Makers)	$0 (Shared Liquidity Pool)
Time to Revenue	6 Months	2 Weeks
TOTAL Year 1	~$434,000+	Zero Upfront (Rev Share only)

The "Revenue Share" Model

Instead of charging you $400k upfront, we align with your success.

• We take: A small basis point fee (bps) on trading volume.

• You get: A world-class tech stack, 24/7 uptime, and immediate liquidity.

Verdict: The "Build" option puts you nearly half a million dollars in the hole before you sign your first user. The "Buy" option lets you use that capital for Marketing and User Acquisition instead.