See Exactly Where Every Dollar Goes.

Kove connects to your financial accounts through Plaid. The way Plaid bills us is per individual account — your checking account, savings account, credit card — not per bank or institution. To keep costs predictable, we looked at national averages for how many accounts Americans typically hold and built our tier limits around that. The institution caps aren’t arbitrary — they reflect how real users actually bank, while keeping per-user costs manageable for everyone on the platform.

If you need more institutions than your plan includes, additional ones are available at a lower per-institution rate. This is because users adding extra institutions tend to connect fewer individual accounts per institution than the national average — so the underlying cost to us is lower, and we price it accordingly.

Two line items that might surprise you: payment processing fees and taxes together make up nearly 30% of the cost of your plan. That’s not us — that’s the reality of accepting card payments and operating across multiple states.

On taxes: rather than charge you a variable rate based on where you live and pass the complexity to you, we use a flat 11% tax rate across all plans. This rate is set to cover the highest state sales tax environments we operate in, including Washington where we’re incorporated. If you’re in a state with lower or no sales tax, the difference doesn’t go into our pocket — it funds our internal tax filing system, which handles our multi-state sales tax obligations. This approach is actually cheaper for you than if we used our payment processor’s built-in tax service, which would add an additional fee on top of your plan just to calculate the variable rate.

The labor line item covers contractor costs — occasionally bringing in outside help for design review, logo work, or getting a professional eye on how things look. Kove is run by one person — see the About page — a college student studying accounting and economics. Design and art don’t come most naturally to that background, so when we need it done right we budget for it.

The base student plan is offered at cost. We make no margin on it. Financial habits built in college and early adulthood tend to stick — getting students access to real financial tools at the right moment matters more to us than the margin we’d make on that plan. The secondary student tier carries a small margin, but it’s kept as low as we can make it.

As Kove grows, our costs come down. Plaid pricing decreases with user volume. Infrastructure gets more efficient. Unit economics improve across the board. When that happens, we pass 80% of all cost savings directly back to users — whether that’s $0.10 off a plan or, if we really optimize, closer to $0.50 over time. The timeline depends entirely on user growth and adoption, so we won’t make promises on when. But the commitment to passing savings back is firm.