Great conversion rate, broken unit economics (0.99$ product problem)

I’m in a weird spot and curious how others handled this.

I built a small B2C tool - CheckMate.bio (OSINT/email lookup style). The good news: landing page converts at ~10%, which honestly surprised me. The bad news: unit economics basically kill any chance of scaling with ads.

Here’s the breakdown per purchase:
- Price: $0.99
- PayPal fee: ~$0.34
- Variable cost per run: ~$0.02
- Profit: ~$0.46

So even with a strong conversion rate, I’d need CAC well below $0.46 to make paid acquisition work. But a realistic CPA in my niche would put me around $1–2 per purchase (probably higher), which makes scaling impossible.

Now I’m stuck between a few options:

1. Raise the price - obvious move, but risky. I haven’t tested elasticity yet, and I’m worried conversion could drop hard.

2. Switch to bundles / credits - instead of $0.99 per run, sell packs (e.g. $4.99 for 10). But this will break the principle of a simple one-time purchase.

3. Subscription model. Might work for power users, but feels forced for a mostly one-off use case.

Right now, it feels like I optimized for conversion instead of economics.

Is anyone trying to develop a $1 web service, or is it impossible to do today?