Pricing what you resell: cost, markup, margin and the invoice at the end of it

Pricing what you resell breaks down into eight sums that are each easy to do in your head once and easy to get wrong across a whole book of customers: the margin on a single sale, the seat cost for a customer buying licences in bulk, the point at which your fixed costs are covered, what your recurring revenue and your customers' lifetimes are actually worth, and the notice a price increase needs before it lands on someone's renewal. How to price reseller services: markup, price lists and customer-specific rates already covers what markup and margin mean and how a price list or an agreed price works; this guide does not repeat any of that. It hands you a calculator for each of the sums instead, each one linked at the exact row of arithmetic it replaces.

Pricing what you resell, one sum at a timeCopy Anchor Link

Eight free tools, each built for one sum in this guide rather than for the whole book of a reseller's business at once.

How do you work out one sale's margin correctly, the first time?Copy Anchor Link

The arithmetic for one sale is markup on cost, not margin carved out of the price you charge - the two numbers describe the same profit differently, and how to price reseller services covers exactly how they diverge and what to do about it. What that post does not give you is a way to see every product line of a real month side by side: domains at one margin, licences at another, numbers at a third, against the fixed costs none of those lines ever see on their own.

That is what the reseller profit planner is for. Enter each product line as a name, a quantity, a cost and a price, add your fixed costs for the month, and it stacks the lines into one month's revenue, cost of sales and net profit, naming the thinnest-margin line and the line still priced under cost rather than burying either in a total. A healthy margin on every individual line can still leave a month behind once the fixed costs are subtracted, which is the thing a single sale's margin can never show you.

How do the costs of Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 actually compare today?Copy Anchor Link

At list price, read on 15 October 2026, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 charge the same figure at every business tier.

Prices read on 15 October 2026 from Google Workspace: Pricing and Microsoft Licensing: 2026 Microsoft 365 packaging and pricing updates, which states the figures above took effect 1 July 2026. Google's page shows a 16% discount for a one-year commitment on top of the monthly figure. Check both pages again before you build a price list from this table, because list prices move and a commitment term can change what you actually pay.

Storage is where the identical bill stops meaning the same thing. Google pools 30 GB across Gmail and Drive together on Business Starter, then gives 2 TB per user on Standard and 5 TB per user on Business Plus. Microsoft gives every Business tier 1 TB of OneDrive per user, separate from a 100 GB mailbox with a 50 GB archive on Basic and Standard, growing to a 1.5 TB archive on Business Premium (Microsoft Learn: OneDrive service description; Microsoft Learn: Exchange Online limits; both read 15 October 2026). A pooled allowance and a per-user one are not the same promise to a customer with one heavy user, which is the kind of question a per-seat total cannot answer on its own.

The Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 cost comparison tool runs the seat arithmetic at any tier and seat count you pick, and states the storage behind each figure next to the bill, each with the date it was read. For the fuller comparison of which programme to actually join - entry requirements, API shape, support burden, published seat counts - see Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365: which is better to resell?

How do you plan licence seats across many customers?Copy Anchor Link

A seat term is three numbers, not one: what the vendor bills you this month, what that figure costs across the whole commitment, and what share of it is seats nobody is actually signed in to. The seat cost planner takes a seat count, a price per seat and a term, and reports all three together with a mid-cycle change worked out to the day, so a customer adding two seats eleven days before the end of a cycle gets a part-cycle figure rather than a full month's charge or nothing at all.

The proration calculator is the same part-cycle arithmetic on its own, for checking a line on a vendor invoice that looks wrong: the cycle price divided by the days in the cycle, times the days left, times the seats that changed, rounded once at the end. It is also the tool to reach for before promising a customer a fair part-cycle figure, because ResellerHQ's own mailbox licence billing does not prorate a seat change - checked against the licence code itself, not only the docs: adding a seat charges a full month at the price the licence was bought at, and a seat count cannot be lowered once bought. Mailbox licences are sandbox-only today while live ordering opens account by account (see mailbox licences for the rest of how one renews and what happens if a renewal goes unpaid), so this is a rule worth planning a price list around before live ordering reaches your account, not one you are reconciling a real invoice against yet. A reseller who promises a customer a fair part-cycle charge for a mid-month seat addition has to work that figure out themselves, which is exactly what these two calculators are for. A licence.updated webhook fires the moment a seat count actually changes - "The seat count changed" (webhooks) - which is the moment to run either calculator and tell the customer what the change is worth.

How many customers do you need before the business pays for itself?Copy Anchor Link

Fixed costs are the part a single sale's margin never shows: the tooling, the support hours and the hosting that are owed whether or not anyone buys anything this month. The reseller break-even calculator divides a month of fixed costs by the profit one customer leaves behind, after your own supplier cost, and rounds the answer up, because no customer signs a fraction of a contract. Below that count, the business is being funded out of something else; above it, every further customer is profit rather than a contribution toward the bill.

The number worth entering is profit per customer, not revenue per customer - a customer who pays $180 and costs $60 to serve contributes $120 toward the fixed costs, not $180, and dividing by the larger figure understates how many customers you actually need.

What is your book of customers actually worth?Copy Anchor Link

Two different questions, and two different tools.

What the book bills right now, and where it is headed. The MRR to ARR calculator turns monthly recurring revenue into its yearly figure, then projects the next twelve months from new revenue, expansion, churn and contraction. A reseller's recurring revenue is rarely as smooth as that projection: a licence seat bills every month, but a domain or a number renews once a year and lands the whole fee in a single month, so the tool is most useful for the underlying trend rather than for predicting any one month's invoice.

What one customer is worth over their whole life, not just this month. The customer lifetime value calculator applies your margin before it answers, because a reseller keeps the margin and nothing else - a revenue-based lifetime value is close to three times the profit figure at a 35% margin, which is the kind of gap that makes an unprofitable acquisition channel look fine for a year. Lifetime value here comes from the churn rate: lose three customers in a hundred each month and the average customer lasts a little over thirty-three months, multiplied by the monthly profit one customer leaves behind.

How do you raise a price without losing the customer?Copy Anchor Link

A price increase needs two things: the right notice, and the right wording. How to price reseller services already covers the notice side - what Google's and Microsoft's own reseller terms say about how much warning a price change needs and whether it reaches something a customer already holds - so this guide does not repeat it.

What it adds is the wording. The renewal increase notice builder takes the old price and the new one and hands back a paragraph naming the exact dollar change and percentage, worded as an increase or a decrease, ready to paste into an email once the notice period has actually been checked. It pairs with two events ResellerHQ already emits: price_list.updated, which the webhooks guide lists as "A price list changed; changed names the settings that moved and customerIds the customers on it" (webhooks), fires the moment the new price is set, which is when the figures below are known and the notice can be written; domain.renewed, listed there as "A domain was renewed" (webhooks), fires when a renewal actually bills - the latest point a notice like this one should already be sitting in a customer's inbox, not the moment to start drafting it.

How do you turn all of this into money collected?Copy Anchor Link

Everything above decides what a customer owes. None of it collects the money. How to invoice your reseller customers covers what an invoice must show, invoicing a sale as it happens versus running one monthly billing run, and how to chase an invoice that has gone overdue - none of which this guide repeats. Work the sum, price the sale or the seat correctly, and the invoice at the end of it is the easy part.