The rate this panel charges per 1,000 units is your cost, not your selling price — what you charge on top of it is the entire margin your reselling business runs on, and getting that markup wrong in either direction causes a real, specific problem.
Price too close to cost and there's no room left to absorb the ordinary cost of doing business: refunds on the occasional failed order, refills on services that drop below their guarantee window, and payment processing fees if you're collecting card or crypto payments from your own customers. A service costing $1.00 per 1,000 sold at $1.10 looks profitable on paper, but a single refunded order wipes out the margin from ten successful ones at that spread.
Price too far above cost and the same service becomes visibly worse value than a competing panel selling the identical underlying provider service for less — and in a market where most panels draw from an overlapping pool of the same handful of wholesale providers, a customer who compares prices across two or three panels will notice a service that's identical in every respect except cost.
A workable starting point is pricing to survive a bad month, not an average one. Take the provider's cost, add a markup wide enough to cover the refund rate you're actually seeing (track it — don't guess), the refill obligations on services carrying a guarantee window, and payment processing costs, and only then add the margin you actually want to keep. A markup in the 30-60% range over cost is typical across the industry for consumer-facing panels, though the right number depends heavily on your refund rate and how price-sensitive your specific customers are.
It's also worth pricing per service rather than applying one flat markup percentage across the entire catalog. A service with a strong refill guarantee and low drop ratio can carry a tighter margin because it rarely costs you anything after the sale; a service with no refill and a higher drop ratio needs a wider margin to cover the replacement cost you'll eventually eat when a customer complains six weeks later and you decide to make it right anyway.
The arithmetic is simple once the real costs are accounted for — the mistake almost every new reseller makes isn't the markup percentage itself, it's forgetting that refunds and refills are a real, recurring cost that has to come out of the margin before what's left counts as profit.
