Nine thousand nine hundred euros, one hundred seats, no venture capital. The arithmetic behind Linkette's Founding Member tier — and what it buys.
The math is small enough to fit on a café napkin. Ninety-nine euros, multiplied by one hundred seats, equals nine thousand nine hundred. That is the entire seed round of Linkette. There is no SAFE note, no convertible, no board observer seat, no twenty-month runway slide. There is a number, a cap, and a promise.
I want to explain why I'm doing this now, before I have shipped the next feature, before the product is even old enough to have a second changelog entry. I want to explain it because I think the standard founder story — the one where you raise eighteen months of runway from a tier-two fund and pretend you didn't dilute yourself by twenty-two percent — is not the only story available to a European SaaS founder in 2026. And because if this works, I'd like a few other people to try it.
The arithmetic, fully
The Founding Member tier is €99, paid once, ever. It is lifetime access to the Atelier plan, which is the paid tier of Linkette. It is capped at one hundred members. That cap is not a marketing flourish — it is encoded in a database row with a seats_remaining column that decrements on every successful Mollie webhook. When it hits zero, the public checkout closes and the page renders a small note that says, in essentially these words: thank you, we're full.
Ninety-nine times one hundred is nine thousand nine hundred. Subtract Mollie's fees (roughly 2.9% plus 25 cents per transaction, give or take, depending on the card network) and you are left with something close to €9,500 in the bank. That is not a Series A. That is barely a French freelance contractor's gross monthly bill. But it is also exactly what I need to run Linkette for the next six months at the level of infrastructure I've chosen — Supabase Paris on the Pro plan, Scaleway hosting, BunnyCDN for the page CDN, Brevo for transactional mail, Plausible for analytics, Mistral La Plateforme for the AI surface. I have spreadsheets. The numbers work.
What the seats actually buy
A Founding Member receives, in plain language: lifetime access to the Atelier tier, which would otherwise be priced around €8 per month once general pricing settles. They receive a small badge on their public Linkette page reading Founder N° 01–100, with their actual ordinal — the seventh person through the door gets Founder N° 07. They receive priority email response from me, personally, for as long as I run the company. And the first ten members, whom I'm calling the Mécène cohort, receive a one-on-one theme co-design session: I sit down on a video call, we discuss the visual register you want for your page, and I build a custom theme variant for you that ships into your account permanently.
There is no upgrade path that is better than this. There will never be a tier that is cheaper, per year of access, than the Founding Member tier. If Linkette is around in ten years and you paid €99 in May 2026, you will have paid less than a euro a month for the entire decade.
The precedent — being honest about it
I am not the first person to try this. The pattern has a long indie SaaS pedigree, and it is intellectually honest to name the precedents rather than pretend I invented it.
TinyMCE Cloud ran a lifetime tier in its early years. Plausible Analytics, the Estonian privacy-first analytics company whose product I happen to use on this very site, sold lifetime accounts in its early days before settling into recurring pricing. AppSumo built an entire marketplace around the model. The pattern works because it solves a specific problem: a small software company needs cash before it has either revenue or fundraising leverage, and the people most likely to give it that cash are the people who would have been the first hundred paying customers anyway. You compress their first decade of subscription payments into one transaction, take a haircut on lifetime value, and gain a year of independence.
The haircut is real. If a Founding Member would otherwise have paid €8 per month for five years, that's €480 of revenue I am leaving on the table per seat. Across one hundred seats, that is €48,000 of forgone subscription revenue that I am trading for €9,900 today, refunded against zero dilution, zero board seats, zero pressure to raise a Series A in eighteen months at a valuation I'd be uncomfortable defending.
I think that is a good trade. I think it is especially a good trade for an EU-sovereign product, because the kind of person who pays €99 today for a French link-in-bio platform is, almost by selection, the kind of person who will tell three friends. They self-select for evangelism.
Why now, not later
The orthodox advice is to wait for product-market fit before selling lifetime tiers. The reasoning: if you raise the price later, lifetime buyers locked in at the early rate will have captured most of the upside. If your product fails, you've taken money from people you can't refund.
I am ignoring the first concern because the entire point is to give the first hundred buyers most of the upside — they are paying for risk, and risk should be compensated.
I am addressing the second concern with a thirty-day refund window. If, in the first thirty days after purchase, Linkette does not do what you hoped it would, write to me at founder@linkette.eu and I will refund you in full, no questions about it, no exit survey. The refund voids only if you have actively used the AI surface in volume — more than fifty Mistral calls — because at that point I have paid real money to a third-party processor on your behalf and cannot recover it. Everything else: refundable.
What I am not doing
I am not promising features I haven't built. The Founding Member page lists what exists today and what is on the public roadmap with rough timing. I am not promising Linkette will exist forever. I am promising that if it does, you have a seat at the table for the price of a decent dinner in the eleventh arrondissement.
I am not running a flash sale. The tier opens, it fills, it closes. There is no countdown timer designed to manufacture urgency — the urgency is real, structural, and exhausts itself when the hundredth seat is taken.
I am not raising a parallel round in the background. There is no SAFE note I'm trying to top up. There is no preferred equity I am quietly negotiating with a French Tech investor while I sell lifetime seats to indie creators. This is the round.
A small confession
I find the standard seed-round narrative — the one where you spend three months pitching tier-two funds, accept a twenty-two percent dilution, gain a board observer, and then immediately spend the money on AWS bills you didn't need — exhausting. Not because it doesn't work. It works. Plenty of good companies have been built that way. It's exhausting because the founder is asked to perform a particular kind of optimism, in particular rooms, for particular audiences, and the optimism is rarely about the product. It's about the story of the product, which is a different thing.
I would rather sell something small and real to one hundred people who want it, take €9,900 to my actual bank account, and spend the next six months building. The story will sort itself out.
If you have read this far and the model resonates — if you would like to be Founder N° 07, or N° 41, or N° 99 — the page is at linkette.eu/founding. The cap is real. If it's already closed by the time you arrive, I will not feel offended if you write me a note saying you wish you'd been earlier.