We charge $0.50 when a guest levels up. Here’s why.

Most software sold into family entertainment is priced per month, per location. It is a clean model for the vendor and a leap of faith for the operator, who is asked to pay the same amount in a month where the thing worked and a month where nobody touched it.

Picking the moment that matters

If you are going to charge for outcomes you have to decide which outcome. We considered a few. Charging per check-in punishes venues for being busy and rewards us for activity that might mean nothing. Charging per redemption sounds appealing until you notice it penalises the venue for offering generous rewards, which is exactly the behavior we want.

The level-up is the right event. It only fires when a guest has played enough to move up a rung, and it is the moment a new reason to return lands in their pocket. It is rare enough to be meaningful — with seven levels, a guest climbing all the way from Rookie to Legend generates six billable events.

What that means in practice

Perkiverse costs $0 per month. There is no platform fee, no per-location license, no setup charge and no annual contract. You are billed $0.50 each time a guest reaches a new level while checked in at your venue. If a guest levels up at another operator’s venue, that is their line item, not yours.

A month where nothing happens produces a zero-dollar invoice. We think that is the correct amount to charge for a month where nothing happened.

The obvious objection

Does this incentivize us to make leveling up too easy? The ladder is the main constraint: seven rungs, and the thresholds are published rather than tuned per venue, so we cannot quietly inflate XP to manufacture invoices.

The sharper version of the question is about decay. Perkiverse XP falls slowly when a guest stops earning, which is what keeps a level meaning “this person plays” rather than “this person played once.” But it also means a guest can drop a rung and climb it again, so “six per guest” is a description of the straight-line case, not a hard lifetime cap.

[[PLACEHOLDER — before publishing this post, state Sileo’s actual policy on re-attained levels: do they bill again, is there a cooldown, is there an annual per-guest cap? Publishing a pricing-philosophy post that dodges the one question an operator will actually ask would undercut the whole argument.]]