If you've got an unlaunched project and no appetite for the launch grind, someone will offer to help — for a price. The price comes in 3 currencies: cash, revenue, or ownership, and the revenue share vs equity question is where most builders get the worst terms of their lives signed before they've made their 1st dollar. Each structure creates different incentives, and the incentives matter more than the rates, because they determine how your helper behaves after the invoice clears. This post breaks down agencies, freelancers, accelerators, and rev-share operators by 1 question: who wins when, and what happens to you when they stop winning. Use it to evaluate any deal — including ours.
Agencies and freelancers: you're buying hours, not outcomes
An agency bills for effort. That's not an insult, it's the business model: scope, hours, invoice. A competent dev shop will wire your Stripe integration and ship your landing page, and what happens next is structurally not their problem. They get paid whether your product earns $0 or $10k/mo, which means their incentive peaks at "deliverable accepted" and falls off a cliff after.
The numbers are the obvious catch — agency builds commonly run somewhere in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars depending on scope, hedged because quotes vary wildly — and you pay before you've validated anything. The subtler catch is selection: an agency takes any client who can pay, so their yes tells you nothing about whether your project has legs. Freelancers are the same model with less overhead and more variance. Both are fine choices when you know exactly what you need built and you're keeping the operating wheel yourself. They're a poor choice when the thing you're missing isn't code — most builders with unlaunched repos have plenty of code — but launch and distribution, which by definition can't be handed off as a fixed-scope deliverable.
Equity: the most expensive money you'll ever spend
Accelerators and incubators take ownership — historically often somewhere around 5-10% for a standard program, though terms vary and you should check the current ones. For a venture-track startup that wants the network and the demo day, that can be a fair trade. For a side project, it's usually wrong on 3 counts.
1st, equity is permanent. A fee is paid once; rev-share ends when revenue ends or terms cap out; equity is forever, on the project's best-case outcome, the one scenario where you'd most regret giving it away. 2nd, the program wants your life, not your repo. Accelerators are built around full-time founders, pivots, and a fundraising arc — the standard advice inside one is to quit your job, which is precisely what a side-project builder isn't doing. 3rd, incentive mismatch: an equity portfolio is swing-for-the-fences math. Their model needs a few huge outcomes; a project that would delight you at a modest monthly revenue is, to them, a write-off. You want a steady earner; they need a unicorn, and that gap shows up in every piece of advice they give you.
If someone offers "we'll launch it for 20% of the company," translate it: you're paying the most expensive currency you own for help whose cost should end when the help does.
Rev-share: aligned by construction — if the terms are sane
Revenue share is the structure where the helper only earns when the product earns. No upfront cash, no ownership transfer; they take a percentage of revenue, usually after fronting the work themselves. The alignment is structural rather than promised: if they launch you badly, they eat the cost. That also makes selectivity a feature — a rev-share operator who says yes to everything is either lying about the model or about to be broke, so a real "no" rate is evidence the "yes" means something.
But rev-share deals live and die in the terms, and this is where you read slowly:
- The percentage and its trajectory. Does the cut decline over time or after a recoup threshold, or is it flat forever? A cut that starts higher and steps down once costs are recovered is the builder-friendly shape.
- Caps and floors. Is there a total cap on what they can extract? Minimum payments that bite even in $0 months? A "rev-share" with a monthly floor is a loan wearing a costume.
- Who owns what. The IP, the domain, the customer list, the Stripe account. If any of those land in their name, you didn't do a rev-share deal — you did an acquisition without noticing.
- Port-out rights. Can you leave, and what does leaving cost? You want the right to kill the deal or port out — code, data, customers — on terms written down before anyone's earned anything. No exit clause, no deal.
- What "revenue" means. Gross or net? Who eats refunds, chargebacks, and infrastructure costs? Vague revenue definitions are where aligned deals quietly become misaligned.
A rev-share deal that passes all 5 checks is, for a side project, usually the best-aligned structure on this list. One that fails the ownership or port-out check is worse than an agency invoice, because it fails slowly.
Where LaunchBuddy sits — graded on its own rubric
LaunchBuddy is a launch studio, and the deal is meant to pass the checklist above, so grade it. You can pay a flat fee — pricing is being finalized with the 1st cohort, so treat any figure as a placeholder — or do rev-share, where you'd keep roughly 70% of revenue, rising toward 90% once the build cost is recouped. Those numbers are placeholders too, hedged until a deal is signed; the shape is the point: declining cut, recoup threshold, your ownership untouched. You keep the IP and the project; we profit from operating, not owning. And the port-out check: you can kill or port out anytime — that's in the structure, not the FAQ. Selectivity is the skin in the game: a yes is a bet, not an invoice, which is also why a no comes with reasons. If you're weighing this against just selling the thing outright, we've compared those paths in should you sell your side project or launch it — and for how this category emerged at all, see the rise of the launch studio.
Run the checklist on us
Don't take alignment claims on faith — ours or anyone's. Take the 5 checks above into every conversation and watch who gets uncomfortable. If you've got an unlaunched project, start with a free, honest assessment at launchbuddy.app: what it is, what's missing, whether we'd take the bet. If it's a no, you get the why. 60 seconds to submit, no deck, and every number gets finalized — in writing — before you owe anyone anything.