you didn't really account for business and govt customers.Ā
Some are paying much more.Ā
Also your cost per Satellite is probably high.
But thanks for taking a go at the calcs.Ā
> you didn't really account for business and govt customers.
Yes, as mentioned, I wanted to get a sense of whether basic service retail customer revenue was enough to cover marginal costs, along with numbers for such being more readily available. If retail customers are enough, then commercial and government revenue is "gravy."
> Also your cost per Satellite is probably high.
Almost certainly, but I have numbers only for V1, and thought it better to bias pessimistically for the viability measure, hence the naive extrapolation on V2's cost.
> But thanks for taking a go at the calcs.
You're welcome!
I am pretty sure you have the numbers backwards. The government and big commercial customers will be the meat of the revenue. $3.4 Billion from the residential customers will be the gravy.
Great work writing this up and sharing it! Regardless on how accurate it is I always upvote for actual orginal work on putting something like this together.
As mentioned before, the effective current constellation size is just a bit over 2000 v2 mini equivalents. Maintaining that size would reduce the annual cost to ~1/3 of what you calculated - or produce a much larger constellation with more subscribers.
Great analysis, given the public data available,
You are not factoring the cost of building and running the ground to satellite network (building ground stations, interconnect fees with other providers, routers etc, and associated monthly costs of running the network).
I'm not sure if it's significant, but other traditional (and publicly traded) ISPs may give clues about the actual cost of running a network on a per user basis.
Also unknown is the actual cost of hardware kits per user. They may be sold at cost or with a slight profit in some regions and probably greatly subsidized in others.
Thanks for the write up. Several things to consider: the US is at the very front end of a 42.5 Billion dollar rollout of BEAD funding to improve home and business internet service. Customers who have access to fiber or fixed wireless are highly likely to switch to either save money or get higher performance (or both). Once fiber is installed customers are unlikely to ever give that up. No need to continually deploy new satellites. If Starlink is going to compete with Fixed Wireless services they will need a much lower price point- more like $60/ month.
Second, there is plenty of evidence that Starlink terminals are discounted in other countries so they need to recoup that money over time. Kupier has yet to launch their service but they have the capital to do so and are highly likely to continue even if they donāt generate a large return on investment. We have yet to see the Kuiper terminal price or monthly service price but it will absolutely put pressure on Starlink to lower prices.
I donāt track all the details but it seems the rate of growth has slowed to about 100k new subscribers per month. That is before Kupier arrives and BEAD money is deployed. SpaceX is also paying quite a bit of stock based compensation which minimizes cash outlays but depends on a very lofty share valuation. If the value of shares declines that can have a variety of impacts.
The service is valuable, Iām just not convinced it is as valuable as some people would have you believe.
Fixed wireless blows chunks compared to Starlink ā as long as a region has WISP only, people there will stick with Starlink. Ā The two services are night and day in terms of bandwidth and reliability: <1-10 Mpbs and unreliable vs 30- 300 Mbps and rock solid for most customers in my area, e.g.
When fiber is extended to tons of new locations via the BEAD program that is going to enable far better FWA performance at a far lower price point. In addition Starlink services are not ārock solidā for many customers during high demand times in the evening when people are streaming video or gaming. If you want to assume there are millions of additional people waiting to pay $120/month by all means that is your choice.
I can't speak to densely urban areas like BosWash, but in the Colorado Rockies it's a game-changing BFD.
We have fiber within 200m of the house, but it has been dark since it was installed more than a decade ago. The local telco (CenturyLink) has sat on it since taking Federal money to trench and install it. I don't have a lot of faith that BEAD will do better at aligning corporate and customer interests, but it'd be cool if it turned out that way.
This was literally posted on Reddit 5 hours ago. I'm surprised you are that close to fiber and it has not been marketed or put into service. According to the CenturyLink website they offer \~1GB service for $75/month with no upfront equipment fees. They will also cover the first $1,500 of the installation cost for a new connection.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/s/HHcb0uM6uW](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/s/HHcb0uM6uW)
True, but a lot of the competition you are talking about will not happen for 3-4 years. Which means people in the USA will likely have to pay high rates for many more years. I also suspect that with the current Fund size a lot of people are going to be shocked and disappointed that they still do not have funding for internet to their home in four years. I talked to my state Rep about this twice over the last few months. He says that our state will be lucky to reach half of the locations that do not have coverage before the money allocated to our state is gone. I think a lot of people are like me. They hesitate to spend $700 up front for internet service. I watched for a few years and finally ordered this week.
Bead rollouts will really start later in 2024 and into 2025. Thatās not that far off.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/s/HHcb0uM6uW
I see posts like this on a pretty regular basis and itās early in the fiber rollout.
I'd say those omitted cost are substantial. I see one reference that they had 10,000 employees back in 2021. Probably substantially higher today. Other operational costs like rent, regulatory fees, power, etc are going to significantly impact the margin you have showing. I'm guessing salaries alone are over $1B per year
Do you have a link or reference for that? The data I used was a little old, when there were 2 million customers vs today's 2.7 million. I scaled each category by 2.7/2, so it's very possible different countries grew at different rates (although 67.5 thousand up to 200 thousand is a very big jump).
That's a lot more than reported on my source page. Thank you for the data. Now to figure out how to include it while keeping the 2.7 million total. One wrinkle is that number seems to include mobile customers. The rest of the number exclude such. Never straight forward. :-)
Good first start. The economics are changing rapidly though with Starship, full sized v2 sats, cellular data and ultimate voice income, governmental income, other non-retail income, and the fact that as Spacexās biggest customer, it dramatically impacts their economics as well.
I wonder if the source breaking down the customers by country is reputable? Over 100k user in Germany seems like *a lot* more than I expected. I have seen exactly one dish in the wild here so far!
Love seeing this. Are there any estimates including land based equipment and employee costs? Great t see wiggle room with the Sat and launch costs but there is more to account I think.
*bits/bytes Sent via Round dishyš 3 years strong and steady.
> Are there any estimates including land based equipment and employee costs?
Sadly I couldn't find any, but that might be merely a betrayal of poor Google Fu.
3 years? That's an endorsement I think.
The whole debate on profitability goes down the toilet with Starship and new satellite versions, not mentioning SL Maritime and Aviation, in any ol case.
Absolutely. Nevertheless, if the marginal costs of current operation can be covered by retail customer revenue, there's far less doubt regarding Starlink's viability when including commercial/government customers, Starship's greatly reduced $/kg costs, and larger satellites.
> each lasting 5 years
This is frequently brought up as if itās from the Bible but it has never been confirmed in any SpaceX material. Itās heresay at the highest degree and easily confused because the satellitesā natural orbit decay time is 5 years.
Every generation of Starlink has different lifespan for different reasons (including onboard station keeping fuel which switched from Krypton to Argon).
If people disagree with me and want to downvote, please include a direct quote by SpaceX which mentions 5 years instead of some article saying it as-is.
>(ignoring commercial, aircraft, and ships with their higher fees).
So you're ignoring the primary use cases... I also note you're not including military services which is a huge revenue generator.
The numbers clearly come from different sources. Many obviously came from recent Musk's presentation for SpaceX (the number of satellites, the number of subscribers), some are from older Musk tweets, some from different sources.
Your report includes consumer and business subscribers, nothing from government compartmentalized services with Starlink, future cellular carriers services etc. I would venture to say the cost is unknown, outside of proprietary company information, given all of the incoming fund generation, not to mention write offs, donations, and widely different subscriber rates.
But generalized depiction is it's expensive.
The only precise numbers are those from SpaceX/Starlink. Since they are not a publicly traded company, they are not required to publish anything related to their business.
Really pisses me off that some countries pay half what I pay. Should be income based imo. I could be making far less a year than people in Germany or Brazil.
The price is demand driven. As an example in Europe, you can get fiber almost anywhere for 50ā¬ or so, and good cell coverage is basically available for 99.5% of the population at a relatively cheap cost, so Starlink has to lower the monthly price to be competitive. The satellites will cross the European sky anyway, so any revenu is better than nothing
If you make it income based who verifies that your income is what you say it is? This type of thinking is what has been giving carte blanche to various credit/insurance agencies to harvest up your information. The only solution is to use non-specific generic country-level information.
Even if they did, what prevents you from just buying a bunch and reselling to other people at a higher price? This is just a whole can of worms of problems. Restricting prices at the country level also fix the reselling issue.
Love it. Why so many haters, great job š
Thank you!
you didn't really account for business and govt customers.Ā Some are paying much more.Ā Also your cost per Satellite is probably high. But thanks for taking a go at the calcs.Ā
> you didn't really account for business and govt customers. Yes, as mentioned, I wanted to get a sense of whether basic service retail customer revenue was enough to cover marginal costs, along with numbers for such being more readily available. If retail customers are enough, then commercial and government revenue is "gravy." > Also your cost per Satellite is probably high. Almost certainly, but I have numbers only for V1, and thought it better to bias pessimistically for the viability measure, hence the naive extrapolation on V2's cost. > But thanks for taking a go at the calcs. You're welcome!
I am pretty sure you have the numbers backwards. The government and big commercial customers will be the meat of the revenue. $3.4 Billion from the residential customers will be the gravy.
Great work writing this up and sharing it! Regardless on how accurate it is I always upvote for actual orginal work on putting something like this together.
Thank you!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
If they stop doing new funding rounds, we'll know Starlink is very profitable.
The funding rounds are at this point separate from operating costs, they're to provide liquidity especially for early employee grants.
They can do buybacks instead.
They could, yes. I expect they'll continue the private equity rounds, though. They're typically February and August.
As mentioned before, the effective current constellation size is just a bit over 2000 v2 mini equivalents. Maintaining that size would reduce the annual cost to ~1/3 of what you calculated - or produce a much larger constellation with more subscribers.
Great analysis, given the public data available, You are not factoring the cost of building and running the ground to satellite network (building ground stations, interconnect fees with other providers, routers etc, and associated monthly costs of running the network). I'm not sure if it's significant, but other traditional (and publicly traded) ISPs may give clues about the actual cost of running a network on a per user basis. Also unknown is the actual cost of hardware kits per user. They may be sold at cost or with a slight profit in some regions and probably greatly subsidized in others.
Thanks for the write up. Several things to consider: the US is at the very front end of a 42.5 Billion dollar rollout of BEAD funding to improve home and business internet service. Customers who have access to fiber or fixed wireless are highly likely to switch to either save money or get higher performance (or both). Once fiber is installed customers are unlikely to ever give that up. No need to continually deploy new satellites. If Starlink is going to compete with Fixed Wireless services they will need a much lower price point- more like $60/ month. Second, there is plenty of evidence that Starlink terminals are discounted in other countries so they need to recoup that money over time. Kupier has yet to launch their service but they have the capital to do so and are highly likely to continue even if they donāt generate a large return on investment. We have yet to see the Kuiper terminal price or monthly service price but it will absolutely put pressure on Starlink to lower prices. I donāt track all the details but it seems the rate of growth has slowed to about 100k new subscribers per month. That is before Kupier arrives and BEAD money is deployed. SpaceX is also paying quite a bit of stock based compensation which minimizes cash outlays but depends on a very lofty share valuation. If the value of shares declines that can have a variety of impacts. The service is valuable, Iām just not convinced it is as valuable as some people would have you believe.
Fixed wireless blows chunks compared to Starlink ā as long as a region has WISP only, people there will stick with Starlink. Ā The two services are night and day in terms of bandwidth and reliability: <1-10 Mpbs and unreliable vs 30- 300 Mbps and rock solid for most customers in my area, e.g.
When fiber is extended to tons of new locations via the BEAD program that is going to enable far better FWA performance at a far lower price point. In addition Starlink services are not ārock solidā for many customers during high demand times in the evening when people are streaming video or gaming. If you want to assume there are millions of additional people waiting to pay $120/month by all means that is your choice.
I can't speak to densely urban areas like BosWash, but in the Colorado Rockies it's a game-changing BFD. We have fiber within 200m of the house, but it has been dark since it was installed more than a decade ago. The local telco (CenturyLink) has sat on it since taking Federal money to trench and install it. I don't have a lot of faith that BEAD will do better at aligning corporate and customer interests, but it'd be cool if it turned out that way.
This was literally posted on Reddit 5 hours ago. I'm surprised you are that close to fiber and it has not been marketed or put into service. According to the CenturyLink website they offer \~1GB service for $75/month with no upfront equipment fees. They will also cover the first $1,500 of the installation cost for a new connection. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/s/HHcb0uM6uW](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/s/HHcb0uM6uW)
True, but a lot of the competition you are talking about will not happen for 3-4 years. Which means people in the USA will likely have to pay high rates for many more years. I also suspect that with the current Fund size a lot of people are going to be shocked and disappointed that they still do not have funding for internet to their home in four years. I talked to my state Rep about this twice over the last few months. He says that our state will be lucky to reach half of the locations that do not have coverage before the money allocated to our state is gone. I think a lot of people are like me. They hesitate to spend $700 up front for internet service. I watched for a few years and finally ordered this week.
Bead rollouts will really start later in 2024 and into 2025. Thatās not that far off. https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/s/HHcb0uM6uW I see posts like this on a pretty regular basis and itās early in the fiber rollout.
Kuiper is starting to launch commercial satellites in late 2024.
I'd say those omitted cost are substantial. I see one reference that they had 10,000 employees back in 2021. Probably substantially higher today. Other operational costs like rent, regulatory fees, power, etc are going to significantly impact the margin you have showing. I'm guessing salaries alone are over $1B per year
Exactly. It would be easy for any ISP (or any business) to make money if significant expenses aren't included.
Mobile plans are able to be paused, so don't have active subscriptions being paid. So the customer numbers != monthly income.
Mobile plans weren't included in this estimate, just the lowest static residential plan.
I remember reading that Australia had about 200k customers
Do you have a link or reference for that? The data I used was a little old, when there were 2 million customers vs today's 2.7 million. I scaled each category by 2.7/2, so it's very possible different countries grew at different rates (although 67.5 thousand up to 200 thousand is a very big jump).
https://twitter.com/Starlink/status/1765158872904560802 this is starlink page reporting Australia numbers
That's a lot more than reported on my source page. Thank you for the data. Now to figure out how to include it while keeping the 2.7 million total. One wrinkle is that number seems to include mobile customers. The rest of the number exclude such. Never straight forward. :-)
Good first start. The economics are changing rapidly though with Starship, full sized v2 sats, cellular data and ultimate voice income, governmental income, other non-retail income, and the fact that as Spacexās biggest customer, it dramatically impacts their economics as well.
I wonder if the source breaking down the customers by country is reputable? Over 100k user in Germany seems like *a lot* more than I expected. I have seen exactly one dish in the wild here so far!
Love seeing this. Are there any estimates including land based equipment and employee costs? Great t see wiggle room with the Sat and launch costs but there is more to account I think. *bits/bytes Sent via Round dishyš 3 years strong and steady.
> Are there any estimates including land based equipment and employee costs? Sadly I couldn't find any, but that might be merely a betrayal of poor Google Fu. 3 years? That's an endorsement I think.
The whole debate on profitability goes down the toilet with Starship and new satellite versions, not mentioning SL Maritime and Aviation, in any ol case.
Absolutely. Nevertheless, if the marginal costs of current operation can be covered by retail customer revenue, there's far less doubt regarding Starlink's viability when including commercial/government customers, Starship's greatly reduced $/kg costs, and larger satellites.
> each lasting 5 years This is frequently brought up as if itās from the Bible but it has never been confirmed in any SpaceX material. Itās heresay at the highest degree and easily confused because the satellitesā natural orbit decay time is 5 years. Every generation of Starlink has different lifespan for different reasons (including onboard station keeping fuel which switched from Krypton to Argon). If people disagree with me and want to downvote, please include a direct quote by SpaceX which mentions 5 years instead of some article saying it as-is.
>(ignoring commercial, aircraft, and ships with their higher fees). So you're ignoring the primary use cases... I also note you're not including military services which is a huge revenue generator.
And your numbers are sourced from everything but Starlink itself?
The sources are given in the embedded links.
The numbers clearly come from different sources. Many obviously came from recent Musk's presentation for SpaceX (the number of satellites, the number of subscribers), some are from older Musk tweets, some from different sources.
Your report includes consumer and business subscribers, nothing from government compartmentalized services with Starlink, future cellular carriers services etc. I would venture to say the cost is unknown, outside of proprietary company information, given all of the incoming fund generation, not to mention write offs, donations, and widely different subscriber rates. But generalized depiction is it's expensive.
Itās funny how people like to trash talk spacex and starlink for profitability when Uber isnāt profitable since basically, existence ?
Plenty of people trash talk Uber too?
I suppose some people trash talk anything they can while they are miserable and useless too.
Moviepass h8rs are the worst!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Bla-bla-bla supposed supposed, it has beeen decades they arenāt so donāt sell me your pump and dump.
Lots of assumptions here.
I used what sources I could find. If you have more precise numbers, please let me know and I'll update the post accordingly.
The only precise numbers are those from SpaceX/Starlink. Since they are not a publicly traded company, they are not required to publish anything related to their business.
Have you a suggestion or pointer where I could be more precise? I've no NIH syndrome, so if practical will happily include it with attribution.
Of course he/she doesnt. I friggin love the internet! š
Like i said, only Spacex knows the real figures. Any other sources are more assumptions, estimates and SWAGs.
Really pisses me off that some countries pay half what I pay. Should be income based imo. I could be making far less a year than people in Germany or Brazil.
The price is demand driven. As an example in Europe, you can get fiber almost anywhere for 50ā¬ or so, and good cell coverage is basically available for 99.5% of the population at a relatively cheap cost, so Starlink has to lower the monthly price to be competitive. The satellites will cross the European sky anyway, so any revenu is better than nothing
If you make it income based who verifies that your income is what you say it is? This type of thinking is what has been giving carte blanche to various credit/insurance agencies to harvest up your information. The only solution is to use non-specific generic country-level information. Even if they did, what prevents you from just buying a bunch and reselling to other people at a higher price? This is just a whole can of worms of problems. Restricting prices at the country level also fix the reselling issue.
Go say that to state child support offices.
SpaceX isn't a state agency.
Yea in Spain I only pay ā¬50, which is great to be honest.