Managed Markets too expensive? Do this calculation first.

The instinct that a percentage of US revenue feels wrong at your size is usually correct, but it is worth converting the instinct into a number before you decide anything.

What you are actually buying

A managed cross-border service typically provides landed-cost calculation, duty and tax collection, remittance, and merchant-of-record status, which moves a set of compliance obligations off your company.

That last part is the expensive component and the reason percentage pricing exists. You are buying risk transfer, not software.

The calculation

Take your US revenue for the last three months and average it. Multiply by the quoted percentage. That is your monthly cost today.

Now multiply by three, because that is where you intend your US revenue to be. That is your monthly cost at your own target, for identical service.

Then ask what you would otherwise spend to get correct landed cost and prepaid entry without risk transfer. If the gap is large, you are paying mostly for the risk transfer — which is a legitimate purchase, but it should be a deliberate one.

When percentage pricing is right

Your US volume is high enough that compliance exposure is material, your catalogue is complex or spans many origins, or you are selling into multiple countries and cannot maintain classifications yourself.

In those cases pay the percentage. The alternative is a compliance problem you are not equipped to own.

When it is the wrong instrument

Your US volume is a few thousand dollars a month, your catalogue is narrow, and your real problem is that duty is quoted wrong and your customers get billed at the door.

That is a calculation-and-paperwork problem, and it costs roughly the same to solve whether you do $3,000 or $30,000 a month. Paying for it as a percentage means paying more every month for the same work.

This is the gap LiteLanded is priced for — flat fee, duty-inclusive US pricing, prepaid entry, with compliance responsibility staying where it already is.