SpaceX Wants Even More Profits Ahead of Its IPO

SpaceX has picked June 12 as its IPO date. Even before the initial public offering happens, however, SpaceX is laying the foundations for becoming the most profitable space company in history. As I reported in March, SpaceX raised the price on Falcon 9 launches for the fourth time, to $74 million, a 21% increase over the original price. That's a significant price hike, but despite what you might think, rocket launches have become a smaller and smaller part of SpaceX's business over time.

SpaceX today is much more of a Starlink company than a rocket company. And as it just so happens, SpaceX's latest round of price hikes is happening at Starlink.

Image source: SpaceX.

SpaceX's most important business: Starlink

In 2025, the SpaceX satellite internet service called Starlink generated roughly 61% of SpaceX's $18.7 billion in revenue. In 2026, this percentage is expected to grow. This won't happen automatically, however. SpaceX is growing its Starlink user base as one method of growing revenue. Another method is raising prices. (Note that these two actions may work at cross-purposes, though.)

We learned this last week, when PCMag.com laid out a series of six tiers of Starlink "personal" (non-business) service and their respective price increases. Ranging from $5 to $10 per tier, per month, the price hikes look modest at first glance. Percentage-wise, most prices are changing only in the mid-single digits (6.1%) to the low double digits (10%) -- with two notable exceptions.

The price for owning a Starlink terminal and keeping it in standby mode (which pauses high-speed internet service but permits download speeds of about 0.5 megabits per second (Mbps)) has doubled from $5 to $10 per month.

But the price of the 300 gigabits-per-second (Gbps) roaming service remains unchanged at $80 per month.

Data source: PCMag.

It should be noted that prices may vary by location, and that in some locations, Starlink continues to advertise prices and plan names on its website that differ significantly from those noted above.

Moreover, these rates are for personal service. Starlink also offers a wide array of business plans for fixed and mobile users, as well as for maritime and aviation service.

Business versus personal

What's gone largely unreported so far is that, at the same time that Starlink is raising prices for its personal customers, it's cutting prices for business customers. Here are the rates offered for four fixed-site, "local priority" business tiers with varying amounts of total monthly usage today:

• Local Priority 50 gigabytes (GB) (per month) costs $55
• Local Priority 500 GB costs $155
• Local Priority 1 terabyte (TB) costs $280
• Local Priority 2 TB costs $530

In each case, this is a $10 reduction from prices advertised as recently as April, according to an April 8 snapshot found on the Internet Wayback Machine.

What it means for SpaceX

In the run-up to its IPO, SpaceX will obviously want to make itself look as attractive as possible to investors -- which is to say as profitable and fast-growing as possible -- in order to fetch as high a share price as possible on IPO day (and thereafter). Raising prices for residential customers helps with profits, but it risks curtailing subscriber growth.

Charging lower rates on Starlink business customers, on the other hand, may have the effect of accelerating growth among Starlink's most well-heeled customers -- the ones who can pass on prices to their customers, and also deduct them as business expenses. What's more, a $10 price reduction there results in significantly smaller percentage price declines (and thus, less profit lost) than Starlink is implementing in its residential plans.

On balance, I see this less as a story of "SpaceX raising prices" and more as a story of SpaceX tweaking prices across multiple Starlink markets to optimize its growth relative to its profits. Long term, I expect this to make SpaceX stock more profitable, not less.

The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.