Our biggest line item is payroll. We pay competitive salaries and offer benefits through
Justworks (FYI, they're pretty awesome). The second largest item, which might come as a surprise to those not in the tech space, is Apple's 30% cut of EVERY sale on the App Store. It's basically a
distribution cost for selling our product on the App Store to consumers, it comes with the territory and covers regional sales taxes. The rest are expenses: Our
semi-annual work retreats, corporate taxes, and legal fees to name a few. You might notice we don't have office rent, furniture, or kitchen goodies, this is because we're a distributed company. Overall there's not a lot of fat here to trim.
1SE has needed to stay lean from the get go. Taking on a "bootstrapping" mentality, almost in a zen-like fashion, slowly building the team and picking the "best bang for your buck" on the product roadmap. Also, it's 100% privately held with no outside investors like a VC firm, wealthy family member, or angel investors. Now, we can stay on this "bootstrapping" path, continuing to support 1SE, and slowly rolling out new features. However, to address those pain points of our community– like license-free music and secure cloud storage–we need to shift from a traditional single purchase product to something else. This will allow us to create and support the best version of 1SE for generations to come.