Two pricing shapes were on the table.
Metered
Charge per county watched, or per alert, or per message sent. It tracks cost closely and it is what most data products do.
Flat
A free tier that proves the service works, and one or two paid plans that unlock more alerts, more areas, and SMS. The plan is the price; nothing inside it is counted.
The decision
Flat. The persona does not want to think about a meter, and a meter makes the read-back sentence longer. Cost tracking matters less than it looks: a county feed is fetched once a day regardless of how many people watch it, so the marginal cost of a subscriber is the SMS and almost nothing else.
A free tier, a mid plan, and a Pro plan were proposed with figures. The figures are a proposal, not a decision, and this site records pricing only once it is public.