Hostinger study — their catalogue as our benchmark

Young, 2026-10-18: "Study hostinger.com for their products offer and plan up for Yukon IT."

Why Hostinger specifically: the archived Yukon-IT project note already says "storefront design (services-selling, modelled on hostinger.com)" — Hostinger is the shape of the business Yukon IT is trying to be. And Hostinger now offers managed Hermes Agent hosting and managed OpenClaw — the closest thing to a competitor in our lane. This study prices their catalogue against ours.

🔴 Price correction (Echo, 2026-10-18): this study originally used $19.99/mo for managed Hermes/OpenClaw. Hostinger's published price is $5.99/mo on a 24-month term, renewing at $11.99/mo. The $19.99 figure does not appear on Hostinger's current pages. All figures below are corrected; the positioning conclusion is unchanged but the multiple is larger. Evidence: [hostinger-managed-ai-verification](hostinger-managed-ai-verification).

🟠 Re-verification (Echo, 2026-10-21): the catalogue numbers in this study were taken from Hostinger's global .com pages. The Australian .com/au pages carry materially different figures, and the AI plan has moved again. The table in §1 has been corrected in place: the entry plan is A$3.49/mo (renewal A$15.89) on the AU page — the old "A$4.39" was the global rate, not the AU one. §7 carries the full audit, per-claim, with sources and dates. Evidence: [hostinger-pricing-reverification-2026-10-21](hostinger-pricing-reverification-2026-10-21).

1. What Hostinger sells (AU pricing)

This table was measured 2026-10-18 from Hostinger's global .com pages while labelled "AU pricing" — that label was wrong, and every figure has since moved. It is replaced in place by the two tables below (AU first, because that is the page our AU customers see). Full per-claim audit: §7.

Corrected (live, read 2026-10-21) — AU pages (.com/au):

Same plans, global pages (.com, USD) — what the 2026-10-18 study actually read:

The single most important number: A$3.49/month (AU) / $2.49/month (global). That is Hostinger's entry price for a website + email + a free domain for a year. Our Solo tier is A$119/month. We are not competing on price for raw hosting — we cannot, and should not try.

2. Where Hostinger is cheap and why

Hostinger's real product is the 48-month lock-in. The intro price is a customer acquisition cost; the renewal is the revenue. Our model is the opposite — monthly, no lock-in, AI included — because our customer is a retailer who needs a POS and a receptionist, not a A$3.49 website.

3. Where Hostinger is a real competitor (and where it isn't)

Competes with us directly: managed Hermes Agent hosting (A$7.29/mo on a 24-month term, renewing A$17.39 — the AU price; the global USD price is $4.99 renewing $11.99) and managed OpenClaw. That is the closest thing to our EVE offer, and it is cheaper than our Solo tier's AI component alone. A customer comparing "AI agent hosting" prices will see A$7.29–17.39 vs A$119 — and they also get AI credits and Telegram/WhatsApp connectivity included, which our EVE web-chat offer does not yet match. This is the most price-exposed line in our catalogue.

Does NOT compete with us: commerce. Hostinger sells WooCommerce hosting and a generic ecommerce builder. It does not sell Medusa + POS + EVE as a bundle, and it does not sell a tenant-tuned agent with per-business memory. That bundle is ours alone.

4. What this means for our pricing (honest)

The positioning correction: our Solo tier must not be sold as "hosting". It is sold as "a shop + POS + AI receptionist, running on infrastructure we manage." Hostinger sells infrastructure; we sell an outcome.

5. What to take from Hostinger (and what to leave)

Take (feature benchmark only — not security spec):

• Managed agent isolation (their Hermes/OpenClaw offering) — confirms the market believes in per-tenant agent hosting. Validates our P7.
• AI website builder (prompt → site) — a possible future product, not now.
• Free domain for 1 year with hosting — we already include domain at A$5/mo.
• Knowledge base as a product — they list it; we have Docus.

Leave (do not copy):

• 48-month lock-in pricing — hostile to retailers, and our whole pitch is monthly.
• "Unlimited" shared hosting — contradicts our per-tenant stack model.
• Generic WooCommerce — we have Medusa.

6. The Yukon IT implication

Yukon IT is already a hosting business (their public site sells domain names and web hosting). They will compare us to Hostinger on hosting price and find us ~34× more expensive (A$119 ÷ A$3.49 on the AU entry plan; ~27× against the A$4.39 figure previously recorded). That is fine only if we are selling a different product: a managed commerce + AI + KB stack they do not have to build or maintain.

The pitch to Yukon IT: "We are not a cheaper Hostinger. We are the managed Medusa + POS + EVE + KB layer you would otherwise have to build and maintain yourself — and we run it on infrastructure you already understand (Docker, Nuxt)."

The risk: if Yukon IT's customers want A$3.49 websites, we are the wrong vendor. Our product is for retailers with a counter, not bloggers. That is a deliberate positioning choice and it must be stated at the first meeting.

7. Re-verification audit (Echo, 2026-10-21)

Scope: every price and limit in this study, checked against Hostinger's live pages. 38 claims checked, 38 reached, 0 unreachable. Of those: 11 corrected, 25 confirmed unchanged, 1 source found stale, 1 product claim recorded as unverified (it does not appear on any Hostinger page).

Method note that matters for the whole vault: this study's numbers were taken from Hostinger's global .com pages while labelled "AU pricing". Hostinger serves different prices on .com/au, and on some plans materially so. Every figure below is tagged with the page it came from.

Claims that could not be reached: 0. No vendor page failed to load.

The two items that are not simple confirmations:

• #10 AI App Builder — no such product found on Hostinger's AU or global catalogue pages. It may be a name we invented, or a page that has since been withdrawn. Recorded as UNVERIFIED, not assumed absent. It is a product claim we cannot source, not a price we could not fetch.
• #3 VPS tiers — the filed claim was "VPS hosting (tiered, not on landing)". That claim is now false: the tiers are on the landing page, and they are priced. This is a correction, not a reach failure.

Net effect: 11 price/limit claims corrected in place, 1 stale source contradicted by the live page, 1 product claim unverified, 25 confirmed. The positioning conclusion is unchanged — we still do not compete on raw hosting price, and the gap is larger than this study stated, not smaller.

Honest limits

• Prices are intro prices with 48-month lock-in; renewal prices are 3–5× higher (4.6× on the AU Premium plan as of 2026-10-21). I used intro prices for the comparison because that is what a customer will see.
• Hostinger's global and Australian pages disagree, and the AU pages are the ones our AU customers would see. All comparisons should quote the AU figure and say so.
• These are Black Friday promotional prices (read 2026-10-21, "Get your Black Friday deal before it ends"). They are not the steady-state list prices and should be treated as a promotional floor, not a durable benchmark.
• I did not verify Hostinger's managed Hermes feature set beyond their public page (the existing docker-hosting study already noted: "use it as a feature benchmark, not as a SolOS security design spec").
• Yukon IT's own pricing to their customers is unknown — I cannot say whether A$119/mo is something they can resell at a margin. That is a conversation, not a measurement.
• I did not price the Agency Startup plan (A$41.99/mo, 100 sites, 6 CPU, 12 GB RAM, full isolation) — surfaced during the 2026-10-21 pass but out of scope for this study's question.
• I did not test either managed product, and I did not purchase anything.