How to Run a $10M Fund on $297/mo

When Sarah closed her first fund at $10M, she did what every emerging GP does: she started stacking tools.

DocSend for the data room. Visible.vc for LP reporting. Carta for the cap table. Streak for deal flow. Google Sheets for everything else. A shared Drive folder that she optimistically called her "document management system."

Six months in, she was spending $1,553 per month on software, losing three to four hours per week copying data between platforms, and still finding errors in her quarterly reports because her LP commitment numbers in Visible didn't match the amounts in Carta.

This is the story of how she replaced all of it with Archstone Starter at $297/month — saving over $15,000/year and getting her weekends back.

*Note: This case study is a composite based on conversations with dozens of emerging GPs who've made this transition. "Sarah" represents a typical solo GP experience, not a single individual.*

The $1,553/Month Tool Stack

Let's break down what a typical solo GP running a $10M fund spends on operations software before Archstone:

DocSend — $45/month Sarah used DocSend to share her pitch deck, LPA, and fund documents with prospective LPs. It worked fine for tracking who opened what, but the documents lived in complete isolation from her LP records. When an LP viewed her deck, she'd manually note it in a spreadsheet. When she updated the deck, she'd create a new link and hope she remembered to share the right version.

Visible.vc — $159/month Visible handled LP reporting — quarterly updates, portfolio metrics, and investor communications. The templates were decent but rigid. Sarah spent two to three hours per quarterly report reformatting data she'd pulled from four different sources. The platform didn't know about her deals, her data room activity, or her compliance deadlines. It was a reporting island.

Carta — $500+/month Carta managed the cap table and basic fund administration. For a $10M fund, Sarah was paying around $550/month after the first year's escalator kicked in. Carta was solid for what it did — tracking ownership, managing K-1s, running basic waterfall calculations. But it didn't help with deal flow, LP communications, portfolio monitoring, or any of the daily operational work that consumed most of her time.

Streak CRM — $49/month Sarah tracked her deal pipeline in Streak because it lived inside Gmail, which felt convenient until she needed to generate a pipeline report or share deal status with her advisory board. Every deal's context was scattered across email threads, and the data was locked in a format that didn't connect to anything else.

Google Sheets + Drive — Free (but costly) The glue holding everything together. Sarah maintained at least six active spreadsheets: LP tracking (commitments, contacts, communication log), portfolio company metrics (quarterly updates from founders), deal pipeline summary (duplicated from Streak for board meetings), fund economics calculator, compliance calendar, and a master to-do list. Keeping these synchronized with the five paid tools was a part-time job.

The Hidden Costs

Beyond the $1,553/month in direct software spend, Sarah estimated she was losing:

• - 3-4 hours/week copying data between platforms, reconciling numbers, and managing the integration gaps between tools
• - $200-400/month in occasional contractor time to help format LP reports and update spreadsheets
• - Unquantifiable cost of errors: mismatched LP commitment amounts across systems, outdated portfolio metrics in reports, missed compliance deadlines because the calendar lived in a spreadsheet she forgot to check

Annualized: $18,636 in software plus roughly $5,000-8,000 in lost time and contractor costs. For a fund charging a 2% management fee on $10M (that's $200K/year), operations overhead was consuming 12-13% of total management fee revenue.

The Switch to Archstone Starter

Sarah started an Archstone free trial on a Tuesday afternoon. By Friday, she had migrated her entire operation. Here's what the transition looked like:

Day 1: Fund Setup & LP Import

Sarah completed the onboarding wizard in 15 minutes — fund name, size, thesis, economics, and basic preferences. Then she imported her LP list. Archstone accepted a CSV export from her Google Sheet, mapping columns to the LP data model: name, email, organization, LP type, commitment amount, and commitment status.

Within an hour, her 14 LPs were in the system with full profiles, commitment tracking, and communication history ready to build.

Day 2: Data Room Migration

Sarah uploaded her fund documents — LPA, PPM, side letters, pitch deck, quarterly reports, and portfolio company materials — into Archstone's organized folder structure. Each document got a shareable link with view tracking. She replaced her 23 active DocSend links with Archstone links in under 30 minutes.

The immediate improvement: when an LP opened a shared document, that activity appeared on the LP's profile. No more manual cross-referencing.

Day 3: Portfolio & Deal Pipeline

Sarah added her 7 portfolio companies with investment details, ownership percentages, and the most recent quarterly metrics. Then she rebuilt her deal pipeline — 12 active deals at various stages from sourced through due diligence.

The pipeline view gave her something Streak never could: a visual kanban board where each deal card showed the company, stage, check size, score, and key notes at a glance. No more digging through email threads to find deal context.

Day 4: Compliance Setup

This was the migration Sarah had been dreading, and it turned out to be the easiest. She added her compliance deadlines — annual filing dates, K-1 distribution deadlines, AML review schedule, and state registration renewals. Archstone's compliance module organized them by category and due date, with automated reminders so nothing would slip through the cracks of a forgotten spreadsheet.

Day 5: First Archie Interaction

With all her data in one platform, Sarah tested Archie for the first time. She typed: "Give me a summary of my fund's current status — how much is committed, how much is deployed, and which portfolio companies reported metrics last quarter."

Archie pulled data from across every module and generated a clean summary in seconds. No copying between spreadsheets. No reconciling numbers from three different tools. One question, one accurate answer.

A Day in the Life: Running a Fund on Archstone

Here's what Sarah's typical day looks like six months after the switch:

8:00 AM — Morning Check-In

Sarah opens Archstone's dashboard. At a glance, she sees:

• - Fund status: $7.2M deployed of $10M committed, 3 new LP communications to review
• - Pipeline activity: 2 deals moved to due diligence this week, 1 new inbound deal from a referral
• - Compliance: State registration renewal due in 18 days, Q1 LP report due in 22 days
• - Portfolio alerts: One company's burn rate increased 40% quarter-over-quarter

This used to require opening five different apps and two spreadsheets. Now it's one screen.

9:30 AM — LP Communication

An LP emails asking for the latest portfolio summary. Sarah opens the LP's profile in Archstone, which shows their commitment amount, funding history, every document they've been sent, and their engagement (which reports they opened, which data room files they viewed).

She asks Archie: "Draft a portfolio summary email for this LP highlighting our three most recent investments and current fund deployment." Archie generates a professional draft pulling actual numbers from the portfolio module. Sarah edits two sentences, approves it, and sends it — all within Archstone. Total time: 4 minutes.

Previously, this required opening Carta (for fund deployment numbers), her portfolio spreadsheet (for investment details), Visible (to check what this LP had already received), and Gmail (to actually send it). Total time: 25 minutes.

11:00 AM — Deal Review

A founder she met at a conference sends a deck. Sarah creates a new deal in the pipeline, uploads the deck to the data room linked to that deal, and scores the opportunity based on her investment criteria. She moves it to "screening" stage.

She asks Archie: "Based on my investment criteria and this company's sector and stage, how does this deal compare to the last three deals I passed on and the last two I funded?" Archie surfaces the relevant comparisons, highlighting alignment with her thesis and flagging potential concerns.

2:00 PM — Quarterly Report Prep

Q1 is approaching, and Sarah needs to prepare LP updates. She asks Archie: "Start drafting the Q1 LP letter. Include fund deployment status, new investments this quarter, portfolio company highlights, and any notable exits or markups."

Archie generates a first draft pulling data from every relevant module — fund economics, new deals closed this quarter, portfolio metrics from companies that submitted updates, and any cap table changes. The draft is 80% ready. Sarah spends 30 minutes adding color commentary and personal insights, then schedules it for distribution to all committed LPs.

Previously, quarterly reports took Sarah an entire weekend. She'd spend hours extracting data from Carta, formatting metrics from her spreadsheet, writing the narrative in Google Docs, designing the layout, and then manually sending it through Visible. Now the entire process — from first draft to scheduled send — takes about two hours.

4:30 PM — Compliance Check

Archstone's compliance module flags that AML documentation for two LPs needs to be refreshed (annual review cycle). Sarah reviews the existing documentation in each LP's profile, confirms the records are current, and marks the items as completed. The compliance calendar updates automatically.

This is the kind of task that used to fall through the cracks entirely. In the spreadsheet era, Sarah discovered an expired AML review three months late — during a conversation with her fund attorney that was more expensive than it needed to be.

The Numbers After Six Months

Direct Cost Savings

| Tool | Before | After | |------|--------|-------| | DocSend | $45/mo | $0 | | Visible.vc | $159/mo | $0 | | Carta | $550/mo | $0 | | Streak CRM | $49/mo | $0 | | Archstone Starter | $0 | $297/mo | | Monthly Total | $803/mo | $297/mo | | Annual Total | $9,636 | $3,564 |

That's $6,072 saved per year in direct software costs alone.

*Note: Some GPs spend even more on Carta and supplementary tools. We've seen pre-Archstone stacks running $1,500–2,000/month when you include premium tiers, additional users, and annual escalators. The savings scale accordingly.*

Time Savings

| Task | Before | After | |------|--------|-------| | Weekly data reconciliation | 3-4 hrs/week | 0 hrs/week | | Quarterly LP report | 8-12 hrs/quarter | 2 hrs/quarter | | LP communication prep | 20-30 min each | 4-5 min each | | Deal pipeline management | 2 hrs/week | 30 min/week | | Compliance tracking | 1 hr/week | 10 min/week | | Weekly time savings | | ~5-6 hours/week |

Five to six hours per week is roughly 260–310 hours per year. For a solo GP whose time is the fund's most valuable resource, that's the equivalent of getting back six to eight full work weeks annually.

Operational Quality Improvements

Beyond cost and time, Sarah noticed improvements that are harder to quantify but deeply meaningful:

• - Zero data discrepancies: When everything lives in one system, the "which number is right?" question disappears. LP commitment amounts match across every report, every email, every calculation.
• - Faster LP response time: When an LP asks a question, Sarah can answer it in minutes instead of hours. That responsiveness builds trust and signals operational competence — exactly what emerging managers need to differentiate from the competition.
• - Nothing falls through the cracks: Compliance deadlines, LP follow-ups, portfolio company check-ins, deal pipeline reviews — everything is visible in one place with proactive reminders.
• - More professional LP experience: Branded data room links, polished quarterly reports, and prompt communications create an impression of a well-run operation that punches above its weight class.

When $297/Month Isn't Enough

Let's be transparent about the Starter plan's limits. Sarah's fund is a good fit for Starter because she has:

• - 14 LPs (Starter supports up to 25)
• - 7 portfolio companies (Starter supports up to 20)
• - Moderate data room needs (50 shareable links per month)
• - Basic AI needs (10 Archie operations per month)

If your fund is larger — say, 30+ LPs, 25+ portfolio companies, or you want unlimited Archie AI for heavy workflow automation — the Pro plan at $497/month is the right tier. Even at $497, you're still saving significantly versus the $1,500+ cobbled stack, and you're getting features (full AI orchestration, compliance module, cap table tracker) that would cost even more to replicate with individual tools.

The Migration Is Easier Than You Think

The biggest objection we hear from GPs considering the switch is: "I don't have time to migrate right now." That's understandable — fund operations don't pause while you switch software.

But Sarah's experience is typical: the full migration took parts of five days, done in between her regular work. The ROI is immediate. The first quarterly report she built in Archstone took two hours instead of twelve. The first LP inquiry she handled took four minutes instead of twenty-five.

The time you invest in migrating is paid back within the first month. After that, it's pure savings — in dollars, in hours, and in the operational quality that helps you raise your next fund.

If you're running a lean fund and spending more than $297/month on tools that don't talk to each other, the math is simple. Try Archstone free for 14 days and see for yourself.