Why Kapsule
The hosting industry
is broken.
Hosting customers pay too much, get worse service every year, and have to navigate offshore support to do basic things. We started Kapsule to do the opposite.Here’s what that actually means.
Yr1
$5/mo
Yr2
$15/mo
Yr3
$22/mo
Yr1
$5/mo
Yr2
$5/mo
Yr3
$5/mo
Clause 7.5 of our Terms locks your renewal price.
Locked
Renewal price, signup forever
Flat
No per-build, per-egress, per-call
NZ
Support, every interaction
Open
Transparency reports, quarterly
Things we kept noticing
Why the industry got worse.
Every problem below comes from watching customers struggle with their existing host. None of these are invented.
01
Renewal price hikes
What we see
GoDaddy hosting customers report renewals at 200-400% of signup price. Bluehost's $5/month introductory rate renews at $22/month. Hostinger's $3 plans renew at $12. The cycle: hook with cheap, raise when locked in, repeat.
What we do
The price you sign up at is the price you pay forever. We've put this in our terms of service. Not a marketing claim, a contractual commitment.
02
Offshore tier-1 support
What we see
Most major hosts (GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, Hostinger) route initial tickets through call centres in the Philippines, India, or eastern Europe. Cheap for them. For customers, it means 4-hour holds for basic questions and scripted responses that don't address the actual problem.
What we do
Every support interaction is with an NZ-based engineer. No offshore tier-1. If you can't get a quick answer from us, we've failed.
03
Premium pricing for commodity services
What we see
WP Engine charges $1,200/month for managed WordPress hosting that costs ~$30/month in raw infrastructure. Workspace charges $11.40 per mailbox where actual cost is closer to $0.50. The margins are absurd, and they're protected by switching costs.
What we do
We charge based on cost-plus-fair-margin, not what the market will bear. WordPress hosting at $5-35/month. Email at $3/mailbox. The savings aren't a sale, they're the actual fair price.
04
Surprise overage fees and hidden costs
What we see
Vercel customers report bills going from US$20 to US$3,000 in a month due to per-function-invocation pricing. AWS bills surprise small businesses constantly. Even unlimited hosts have fair use policies that kick in arbitrarily.
What we do
Every plan has a hard cap. If you exceed it, we tell you (and ask if you want to upgrade), we don't silently bill. No per-invocation, per-request, or per-GB-egress charges. The number on the plan card is what you pay.
05
Vendor lock-in dressed up as ease of use
What we see
Shopify owns your customer data through their checkout. Squarespace doesn't let you export your site cleanly. WordPress.com locks you into their hosting until you upgrade. The harder it is to leave, the more they can charge.
What we do
Standard data formats. You can export your site, database, mailboxes, and DNS records at any time. If you decide to leave, we help you migrate to wherever you're going. No data hostage tactics.
06
No NZ-owned infrastructure
What we see
Almost every NZ hosting company is a reseller of overseas hyperscalers. When something breaks, NZ support has to file tickets with their upstream provider. NZ customer data sits in overseas data centres subject to those jurisdictions' laws.
What we do
We're a NZ-registered company under NZ law (NZBN 9429050450015, Christchurch). Currently on global enterprise infrastructure with NZ-located origin servers planned Q3 2026. NZ Privacy Act 2020 applies. Disputes resolved in NZ courts.
What we believe
Six principles we won’t compromise on.
Honest renewal pricing
The price you sign up at is the price you pay forever. New customers may get different rates, but existing customers stay grandfathered at their signup rate. Written into our terms.
NZ-based humans only
Every support interaction is with an NZ-based engineer. No offshore tier-1 desks, no scripted responses. If you contact us, you get a real Kiwi engineer.
Plain-language pricing
No starting-from prices that triple at renewal. No per-invocation, per-GB-egress, per-build-minute traps. The number on the plan card is what you pay. Overages alert you, they don't silently bill you.
No vendor lock-in
Standard formats for everything: .mbox for email, SQL dumps for databases, file backups for sites, standard DNS records. Leave any time, export everything, no penalties. We even help you migrate to where you're going.
Build slow, build right
We'd rather ship fewer features done well than rush features done badly. We're building this for the long haul, not for a venture-backed exit. If something doesn't work the way we promised, we fix it before adding new things.
Profit, not extract
We aim to be sustainably profitable. We don't aim to maximise margins by squeezing customers. Hosting is a commodity; the fair price is closer to cost-plus-modest-margin than to what we can get away with.
What we won’t do
Some specific promises in writing.
Things you’ll never see from us. If we ever break one of these, call us out publicly.
Raising prices on existing customers (new customer rates may shift, your rate is locked)
Charging per-invocation, per-build-minute, or per-GB-egress fees
Locking your data into proprietary formats
Routing support through offshore tier-1 call centres
Adding mandatory paid features that used to be included
Suspending accounts without 30-day notice (except fraud/abuse)
Selling customer data, ever
Auto-billing for premium support you didn't opt into
Hidden minimum commitments past your stated billing period
Holding domain transfers hostage past their 5-day legal window
Hold us to this
If you ever see us doing any of the above, email [email protected]. We publish quarterly transparency reports at /about/blog covering any instances where we fell short. The whole point is accountability, not aspiration.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Read more about Kapsule
The rest of the story.
That's the pitch. Now go try it.
30 days free to test we walk the talk. $0.00 today, card on file for renewal to start.