04 — Business Model

The revenue, the unit economics, and the price tiers — at the right level of detail to align on before the subscription MVP ships.

For the team. All numbers marked TBD must be resolved before Phase 1 pricing is locked. See 14_OPEN_QUESTIONS.md.

1. Revenue lines

AgriShala has three pillars and four revenue lines. Pillars 2 and 3 both generate more than one.

| # | Revenue line | Pillar | Cadence | Where it runs |

| - | --------------------------------- | ------ | --------------- | ------------------------------------- |

| 1 | Weekly subscription baskets | 1 | Weekly | Lokkanahalli + future seed sites |

| 2 | Stay + food + events | 2 | Per booking | On-farm lodging, dining, function venue |

| 3 | Workshops & retreats | 2 | Per cohort | Same as line 2, framed as a programme |

| 4 | Vertical-integration retail | 3 | One-off & recurring | D2C website + select stockists |

A fifth, optional: farm-visits-as-tourism (short day visits, school trips, agro-tourism packages), which we treat as a flavour of line 2.

2. Subscription tiers (line 1)

The 1-acre is divided into zones. Each tier maps to a portion of a zone's weekly harvest for a given household size. Pricing is TBD — these are the shapes, not the numbers.

Add-ons (priced separately):

• Same-week photo journal — a 4–6 image digest of your plot, sent before the

delivery so you see what you are about to eat. (Default for all tiers; opt-out for the cheapest.) Q-2

• Delivery-day window — choose a delivery day (e.g. Saturday morning) and a

window. Default = Saturday, 6–9 AM in the Bengaluru range.

• Stay credit — discounted or bundled stay nights at the Lokkanahalli site.

Tied to Pillar 2.

Pricing principles (not numbers)

• Cost-plus floor. Subscription revenue covers the agronomy labour,

land lease / amortised capital, packaging, and delivery, with a thin margin in years 1–2.

• Anchor to the local market, not the global organic market. We are

not competing with iOrganic on per kg; we are pricing a relationship.

• Annual prepay discount. Encourage lock-in (this also improves cash

flow during the long monsoons).

• Pause policy. One paused month per year, per subscriber, no fee.

Anything beyond is a downgrade path.

3. Experience pricing (lines 2 & 3)

The stay + events layer has more conventional pricing — per room-night, per head for events, per seat for workshops — and uses the existing Bamboo Cafe as the in-house kitchen.

Cross-sell hooks:

• Subscribers get a stay-credit once a quarter. See add-ons in §2.
• Workshop attendees get a first-month 50% discount on any

subscription tier — funnel from Pillar 2 into Pillar 1.

4. Vertical-integration retail (line 4)

The seed farm's value-addition kitchen (see 10_FARM_OPERATIONS.md and 11_FARM_ZONING.md) produces a small retail catalogue. We start narrow.

Pricing guidance: positioned at the honest-organics band, not at the luxury-organic band. The consumer promise is "this came from a specific zone of a specific farm", and pricing has to be consistent with that.

Distribution:

• Phase 1 — D2C from the existing web app (new /shop route, see

06_INFORMATION_ARCHITECTURE.md). Manual fulfilment from Bamboo Cafe.

• Phase 2 — Curated stockists in Bengaluru (one bookshop-cafe,

one wellness clinic, one farmer's market stall). No first-party marketplace (see §4a for the carve-out).

• Phase 3 — Subscription bundles (e.g. "monthly essentials box").

4a. Community marketplace (rail, not retail)

A deliberate carve-out from the "no marketplace" rule. The platform hosts a small marketplace for local community producers — Soliga-led at Lokkanahalli — and does not itself act as retailer, reseller, or consignor.

Who lists. Individual producers, producer collectives, and cottage industries from the immediate community around the seed farm. At Lokkanahalli the first cohort is Soliga-led.

What gets listed. First products to enter:

• Wild-forest honey — Apis cerana, harvested seasonally from

community forest apiaries.

• Millets & flours — ragi, jowar, foxtail, navane — grown on the

producers' own plots.

• Wild-tuber preserves — a Soliga staple, lightly processed.
• Forest produce — wild greens, mahua flowers (in season), and

other forest-gathered items the community chooses to commercialise.

How it works. The producer publishes the listing (name, photos, provenance, price). The platform:

• Hosts the listing and provides discovery (search, the

community-marketplace panel on /pilot-farm#sustain).

• Takes a small platform fee per transaction (TBD — see Q-18).
• Routes orders through the existing weekly-delivery logistics when

geography allows (Phase 1+).

• Provides a public audit log of fees and remittances.

What the platform does not do. No consignment, no take-or-pay, no rebranding, no white-labelling, no minimum order quantity, no controlling stake in the producer's price.

Reporting. Revenue and fees from the community marketplace are reported separately from AgriShala's own P&L. The fee funds a community audit and pricing fund that the producers themselves govern. The platform's job is to keep the rails; the community's job is to decide what runs on them.

This is the difference between "we are not building a marketplace" (01_VISION.md §"What we will not do") and what is here: we are not using a marketplace to dilute our own retail. We are hosting one on behalf of the people whose land and labour sustain the platform.

5. Unit economics (very rough)

These are straw-man numbers to anchor the conversation. They do not survive contact with reality until we have one full season of data. TBD — see 14_OPEN_QUESTIONS.md Q-3..Q-7.

Per-acre, per season (Kharif or Rabi)

  Subscription revenue  TBD / yr
  Stay + events         TBD / yr
  Retail (D2C)          TBD / yr
  -----------------------
  Gross revenue         TBD / yr

  Inputs (seeds, packing, fuel, last-mile)   TBD
  Agronomy labour (paid)                     TBD
  Hospitality labour (paid)                  TBD
  Cattle & feed (Pillar 3)                  TBD
  Rent / land amortisation                   TBD
  -----------------------
  Operating cost           TBD

  Gross margin              TBD  %

The point of this section is not the numbers; it is the shape:

• Subscription carries the most recurring weight.
• Stay + events carry the second-highest margin per customer-day.
• Retail carries the lowest margin but the highest brand reach.

6. Pricing experiments & guardrails

We will run small pricing experiments in Phase 1. Guardrails:

• Never price below the cost-plus floor (§2).
• Never advertise a tier we cannot deliver for two consecutive seasons.
• Never promise an item in the basket that isn't from the seed farm or

a named partner. (Traceability is the entire brand. See 08_CONTENT_STRATEGY.md.)

• Never bundle pest-control or herbicide use as a feature.

7. Open numbers to lock

• Q-3 Subscription tier prices.
• Q-4 Stay + workshop pricing.
• Q-5 Per-SKU retail pricing.
• Q-6 Delivery pricing (included vs. surcharge beyond X km).
• Q-7 Pause / cancellation / refund policy.