What Silvatree costs

Before you join, your Capacity Consultant helps you identify your Silva Acceptable Expenses — the costs your business already pays in cash that could instead be paid using Silva. Printing, marketing, maintenance, IT, accountancy, cleaning, and more.

From that, you declare your Targeted Annual Expenses (TAE): the amount you intend to route through Silvatree over the next twelve months. Your TAE sets your fees. Nothing else does.

That is the whole fee structure. There is nothing else to pay. All fees are exclusive of VAT, which is charged at the prevailing rate.

2% of your declared TAE. Minimum £200. Maximum £6,000. Paid once.

Declare £10,000 of TAE and you pay the £200 minimum. Declare £25,000 and you pay £500. Declare £300,000 or more and you pay the £6,000 cap.

It is charged on admission, and there are only two circumstances in which it is ever charged again:

• You resign and later re-join. The joining fee applies afresh.
• You choose to raise your declared TAE. You pay only the difference between the fee on your new TAE and the fee you already paid on your original TAE — never the whole fee twice. This is a voluntary election. Where you have instead simply out-traded the declaration you made, nothing is payable until the annual review, and what falls due there is set out below.

What it covers: your suitability review, onboarding, identity and counterparty checks, and the setting of your initial Trading Headroom.

£20 per month, plus 0.2% of your declared TAE divided by twelve. The £20 platform fee covers the lights-on cost of membership and is identical for every member. The throughput element scales gently with the trading appetite you have asked us to support.

What it covers: your directory listing, account access, AI Trade Matching, and the regulatory and administrative infrastructure that keeps the exchange running. AI Trade Matching is included — there is no separate charge for finding you buyers and suppliers, however many matches it makes.

Silvatree only works if members put opportunities into it. The £20 headline subscription is priced for members who do. Earn nine Participation Credits across any rolling three months — an average of three a month — and the subscription stays at £20 plus throughput. Fall below that and a £20 Network Participation Surcharge is added until engagement resumes.

The threshold is a rolling three-month total, not a monthly test, so one quiet month never costs you anything on its own. A member earning 5, 0 and 4 across three months is above the threshold; a member earning 2, 2 and 2 is not. There is no cap on credits earned above it, and no advantage to earning more.

Two things settle the question permanently. Once either is met, the surcharge never applies again for as long as you are a member, whatever happens afterwards:

• Introduce 10 members into the network, or
• Spend 50% of your TAE within your first six months of membership.

You have proved your participation, and we stop asking you to prove it again — no further purchase requests are expected of you to keep the surcharge off.

Paid by the selling member on each exchange: 6% of the value in pounds, plus 1% in Silva. The 1% in Silva goes to the Reserve Fund — the buffer that protects the network against members who leave owing Silva.

Where a transaction settles partly in cash and partly in Silva, the fee is charged at the standard rate on the full value, whatever the mix. VAT at the prevailing rate is charged on the full combined 7%, and is collected in cash only, never in Silva.

A £1,000 trade. The seller pays £60 commission plus £14 VAT — £74 in cash — and 10 Silva to the Reserve Fund.

We never charge interest on your Trading Headroom. Trading Headroom is how far you can buy ahead of what you have sold. Using it costs you nothing — no interest, no arrangement fee and no charge of any kind, however long you carry a balance. Headroom is not a loan and we do not price it like one. You clear it by selling, which is exactly what we want you to do.

We never take security or personal guarantees. We do not ask for a charge over your business, your assets or your home, and we do not ask a director to stand behind the account personally. Your membership is your business’s, and it stays that way.

Your initial headroom is set from your declared TAE at the suitability call, and rises with time in good standing and genuine two-way trading. It is never bought: a long-standing small member can hold more headroom than a new large one. How it is sized and how it moves is set out in full in the Trading Headroom Guidance.

On the anniversary of joining, we compare what you actually traded against what you declared. The review itself is free.

• Within 15% of your declaration — nothing to pay. That is normal forecasting.
• More than 15% above — a retrospective top-up falls due on the excess only: 2% joining fee and 0.2% throughput. The 15% tolerance is always forgiven first, so there is no cliff edge.
• Below your declaration — nothing is refunded. You asked us to provision capacity, and that provisioning cost us the same whether you filled it or not. You are free to declare lower for the year ahead.

A worked example. A member declares £25,000 and trades £30,000. The excess above tolerance is £1,250, so the top-up is £27.50 in total.

Assuming a member trades the full amount they declared, both buying and selling, and stays above the participation threshold:

A member who falls below the participation threshold every month pays £240 a year more than the figures above.

As a proportion of trade, the total cost falls steadily as you trade more, with no jumps anywhere along the way. There is no point at which trading a little more pushes you into a more expensive bracket.

The table starts at £10,000 because that is roughly where membership starts being worth it, and we would rather say so plainly than sell it to everyone. Below that, the £200 minimum and the £240 a year of subscription weigh heavily against what you route through the network, while the effort we ask of you — keeping a listing current, putting opportunities in — is the same as we ask of a member trading fifteen times as much. If your switchable spending is likely to come in under £10,000, we will tell you on the call rather than take your joining fee. The Standby List below is the better home for you, and it costs nothing.

If you engage with Silvatree properly for a full year and it has not delivered, we will refund your joining fee.

To apply you need to have been a member for twelve consecutive months, be up to date on your fees, hold a Silva balance of zero or better, be in good standing, have a current and accurate directory listing, and not have claimed before. We then look at how you actually engaged over the year and assess it as a whole, in good faith. Someone who narrowly missed a monthly figure but engaged genuinely throughout will not be turned down on that alone. You do not have to leave the network to make a claim.

The full terms are in the Service Satisfaction Guarantee.

The Standby List is a register of businesses who are not yet trading — those introduced by our network partners, and those whose switchable spending does not yet reach the level where membership earns its keep. It costs nothing: no joining fee, no subscription, no surcharge, no charges of any kind.

Nothing changes hands until we bring you a confirmed sale. At that point we offer you full membership on the fees above, and by prior agreement the joining fee can be settled out of the proceeds of that first sale.

• One structure, no tiers. Tiered pricing creates cliff edges — trade one pound more and your costs jump. Ours is a smooth curve. Trading more never re-rates you into a worse deal.
• You pay in proportion to what you use. The member asking the network to carry £150,000 pays about eleven times what the member carrying £10,000 pays, for fifteen times the footprint. That is the shape we want: cost tracks use, with a modest discount for scale rather than a steep one.
• Scale earns a discount, but not an extravagant one. Larger members do pay less per pound. They do not get to trade almost free while smaller members carry the platform.
• Standing is earned, never bought. Trading Headroom rises with time in good standing and genuine two-way trading. There is no upgrade to purchase.
• Our incentives point the same way as yours. Most of what we earn comes from the transaction fee — which means we only do well when members are actually trading. We are not a subscription that profits from members who never use it.
• Fees fund the safety net. The 1% Silva accrual on every transaction builds the reserve that protects the network, and it grows with trading rather than with headcount, so the buffer tracks the risk it exists to cover.