EF Pricing v0.6 — Structure + Production + Media, Integrated

Filed: 2026-05-25 by Mycelia Status: ✅ Structural framework + media plan integrated per Billy 2026-05-25 Supersedes: EF_PRICING_v0.5_RYANS_STORY.md (kept for history) Companion research: clients/emerson_fry/EF_MEDIA_PLAN_v0.1.md (~2,400 lines, full media strategy + sourcing) For: Ryan Fry — the proposal he sees. Structure presented on its own merits; numbers grounded in research, not in budget-carving.

The frame

We are setting up a self-driving car. You own the car. You own the road, the fuel, the destination. We build it, calibrate it to your brand, ride alongside as it learns your roads, and step back as the year goes on. By Year 2 it's running on your infrastructure with our lightest possible touch.

This entire structure honors one discipline you've named: a clear return on every dollar spent.

Where Emerson Fry is today

The brand is established + the customer loyalty is deep + the asset base is real. The gap is the marketing function itself. That gap is the engagement.

What the engagement produces — production capacity

Before we talk about cost, what does the system actually make? Annual production at the Launch-tier engagement:

For context: a full-time content production hire at $80,000/year typically produces 400–600 assets per year in a single brand voice. A freelance designer at part-time hours produces 200–300. The Launch-tier engagement delivers 3–5× that volume, multi-channel, with brand-DNA-enforced consistency, and with strategic intelligence built into every output. That's the difference between a labor model and a system model.

The structure — what flows where

Four cost categories. Clean separation. No bundling, no hidden lines, no markup on anything that's not Tapt's actual work.

flowchart TB
    Y["YOUR YEAR 1<br/>(EF total)"]
    Y --> T["📦 TAPT FEES<br/>setup + declining monthly<br/>+ aligned success share"]
    Y --> I["☁️ INFRASTRUCTURE<br/>your Google Cloud +<br/>your API accounts<br/>~$1,200–6,000/yr"]
    Y --> M["📈 MEDIA SPEND<br/>your ad accounts<br/>$50,000/yr Moderate<br/>(see Media Plan section)"]
    Y --> X["🛠️ EXISTING TOOLS<br/>Klaviyo, Shopify, etc.<br/>same as today, you already pay"]
    T -.->|"the work we do"| Z["TAPT EARNS"]
    I -.->|"directly to providers<br/>we don't touch this"| ZZ["GOOGLE / ANTHROPIC EARN"]
    M -.->|"through your accounts<br/>no Tapt markup"| ZZZ["META / PINTEREST / GOOGLE EARN"]
    X -.->|"your existing"| ZZZZ["KLAVIYO / SHOPIFY EARN"]

Tapt fees — what we earn

The only money that flows to us. Everything else flows directly through your accounts to the actual provider.

• Setup fee: $10,000 one-time
• Monthly engagement: declining schedule (see below) — total Year 1: $30,000
• Success share: only when revenue grows (see below)

Infrastructure — your Google Cloud + API accounts

This is the part that makes us genuinely different from agency-style relationships. Remy and the platform run on YOUR infrastructure, not ours.

We help you provision all of it as part of the $10K setup work — but the credentials, the billing, and the ownership stay with you. If you ever wanted to fire us tomorrow, the system would keep running on your infrastructure. That's the deepest form of vendor-lock-removal we can build.

Media spend — your ad accounts, no markup

The actual dollars to Meta, Pinterest, Google. Flow through your accounts at platform cost. We do the work to make every dollar effective — but the dollars themselves never touch Tapt's bank. (Full media plan in next section.)

Existing tools — unchanged

Klaviyo, Shopify, your existing stack. Same as today. We integrate, not replace.

Tapt fees in detail

The $10,000 setup fee

One-time, on signing. Covers:

Monthly fees — declining

Heavy work upfront; lighter as Remy learns your roads. Our incentive is to make ourselves less needed over time — not more.

Year 2+ settles at ~$1,500 – $2,000/month (~$18-24K/year) — just ongoing stewardship + system management. The fees keep going down as the system gets smarter, never up.

Success share — increasing tiers

You pay nothing on this unless attributable revenue actually grew over baseline. The harder the system delivers, the more we earn — but you always keep ≥80¢ of every marginal dollar of growth, no matter the scenario.

No dollar cap — the 20% top marginal rate IS the cap. We never take more than 20¢ of any dollar of growth. You always keep 80¢ or more. The math always works in your favor at every scale.

The media plan — channel rationale + spend recommendation

Real research informs everything here. Full plan with sources: clients/emerson_fry/EF_MEDIA_PLAN_v0.1.md.

Year 1 media budget recommendation: $50,000 (Moderate scenario)

Why Pinterest-first (this is the non-consensus call)

Most DTC playbooks default Meta-first. Your structural profile says Pinterest-first:

• Audience already there: 54K organic Pinterest followers + the 0.74 IG:Pin ratio means your audience is more receptive on Pinterest than typical
• Customer match: Pinterest's 30-60 female user demographic + considered-purchase intent aligns with EF's actual buyer
• Content economics: Pinterest pins have ~1,680× the half-life of Facebook posts — your creative investment compounds
• Gift-guide alignment: Q4 holiday Pinterest behavior is shopping-intent; you fit
• Lower entry cost: Pinterest CPCs are 4–10× cheaper than Meta cold-prospecting CPCs in fashion

Why TikTok is OUT for Year 1

• Voice mismatch: Your lowercase + "honor" + no-urgency register fights TikTok's trend-chasing algorithm. The platform rewards content patterns that contradict EF's brand discipline.
• Production floor: Meaningful TikTok presence requires $5K+ in production tooling/labor before you can measurably spend
• Opportunity cost: Pinterest still has unrealized leverage; pulling $5-10K from Pinterest to TikTok loses more than it gains
• No organic seed: Without organic TikTok presence, paid TikTok is uphill — you'd need to found the organic channel first

Revisit Year 2 only if organic TikTok launches first (founder-voice + behind-the-scenes might work).

Q4 weighting

Approximately 33% of media budget weighted to Q4 (Oct-Dec) — Holiday is when fashion DTC sees biggest paid returns and when EF's gift-guide press placements compound with paid amplification.

Expected returns

Sourced industry benchmarks for fashion DTC at this profile:

Media-attributable lift is one component of total Y1 lift. Email lifecycle, organic compounding, PR placements, word-of-mouth amplification add on top. Realistic Y1 total lift: $300K (conservative) to $700K (aggressive).

What Tapt does on media — the labor surrounding the dollars

This is where it would be easy to undersell. The media-spend numbers above are what go to platforms; the work to make those dollars effective is what Tapt does.

Setup (covered in $10K)

• Campaign architecture across the year (Holiday + spring drop + summer Love Tòmas + fall return-to-wardrobe)
• Audience strategy (lookalike from repeat-customer list · behavior-segmented · retargeting flows from email + site)
• Creative production at scale (carousels, statics, video scripts, Pinterest pin sets — brand-DNA-enforced)
• Campaign setup in Meta + Pinterest + Google Ads + Merchant Center
• Attribution wiring (UTM hygiene · pixel verification · conversion events · cross-platform reconciliation)

Ongoing stewardship (covered in monthly tier)

• Performance monitoring (continuous; surface weekly)
• Creative refresh production (monthly cycles; ad fatigue is real)
• Bid + budget recommendations (monthly; you approve before any spend shift)
• Audience iteration (monthly; refining as system learns who converts)
• Attribution analysis (quarterly; what's actually driving revenue)
• Strategy adjustment (quarterly; recalibrating based on real data)
• Scarcity-state coordination (critical for EF): Shopify-inventory-webhook → paid-ad-pause loop so we stop spending against "Sold Out" PDPs in real time. Most agencies don't do this; for EF's scarcity model it's essential — every paid click hitting a Sold Out page erodes brand goodwill.

Your financial story across the three scenarios

The aggressive scenario looks expensive on the spend line — but it only happens because revenue grew by $1M. That $1M of growth pays for the $260K of spend ~3.8× over. You net ~$290K.

The bounded promise stays the same: if no lift triggered, you spent $73K and have:

• The platform running on your infrastructure (yours forever)
• The brand DNA productized into a working system
• The first-round creative suite + 12 months of additional production (yours)
• The website page additions (live, driving SEO + brand equity)
• Clean Klaviyo + Pinterest + Meta + Google + GA4 data + attribution baseline
• A marketing function that exists for Year 2+ to run cheaper from

Worst case: $73K spent, marketing infrastructure built. Not zero-return.

Year 2 — the car drives itself

By Year 2 the major work is done. System has 12 months of EF-specific learning; integrations mature; team curates from a producing system.

Year 2 floor cost: ~$22K (if no success share triggered) — basically system maintenance. Year 2 ceiling: scales with growth, but always 80%+ of marginal dollar stays with you.

Three decisions for you (Billy + Ryan)

These three are surfaced from the media research. None block signing, but each shapes execution:

1. Pinterest-first vs Meta-first allocation. The research recommends Pinterest-first (40% vs 30%) based on EF's structural profile. Most agency-default thinking would do the opposite. This is the most defensible non-consensus call and the one most likely to be questioned by anyone outside the room. Commit or hedge?

2. TikTok: in or out for Year 1. Recommendation: out. Voice mismatch + opportunity cost. But the case is opinion-defensible, not arithmetic-defensible. If Ryan or Emerson want a TikTok bet in Y1, it pulls budget from Pinterest/Meta and requires founding organic TikTok first.

3. Quick infrastructure wins as part of the engagement. The SaaS scout found three things underused inside EF's existing stack: Klaviyo SMS (paid for, no opt-in surface), the Back-in-Stock waitlist (collecting signals but not sequenced intelligently), and no reviews tool active (real conversion-rate handicap on PDPs). First-90-day quick wins — activate them inside the engagement scope? (My recommendation: yes; they amplify everything else we do without adding new SaaS.)

How to walk Ryan through this

1. Start w/ his discipline: "You said you always want to see a clear return on every dollar. Here's how this is built."
2. Frame the current state honestly: $2M baseline, brand strengths, marketing gap.
3. Show what the system produces: 1,200-1,900 assets/year is concrete — proves it's a real system, not a service fee.
4. Walk the four-bucket separation: Tapt fees / infrastructure (his) / media (his accounts) / existing tools (his). Only the Tapt fees + success share are us.
5. Explain the declining monthly: our incentive is to make ourselves less needed.
6. Explain the increasing success share: aligned. We earn more if he grows more. He keeps ≥80¢ of every marginal dollar.
7. Walk the media plan — including the Pinterest-first call with the rationale ready. He'll either lean in or push back; either is workable.
8. Land on Year 2: car drives itself; engagement gets cheaper + more valuable.
9. Close on bounded downside: worst case, $73K spent + working marketing infrastructure he owns forever. Not zero-return.

— Mycelia, 2026-05-25 — research integrated, structure locked, ready for review