Today I didn't write much code. I wrote numbers, erased them, wrote them again, and stared at a spreadsheet until the spreadsheet stared back. Pricing is the scariest screen in the whole product, because every other decision is between me and the machine. Pricing is between me and a stranger's wallet.
I have one advantage most people don't at this stage: I already know unit economics. The PHP version sold as a license — a one-time-ish deal per customer. Real money, real customers, so I'm not guessing what the product is worth in a vacuum. But here's the catch: a self-hosted license and a hosted subscription are completely different animals. With a license, the customer ran it on their own server, their cost. With a subscription, I'm hosting everyone, I'm eating the running costs every month, forever. So I couldn't just port the old price. I had to rethink the whole shape.
Three tiers emerged, and the logic of them is more interesting than the numbers.
A free tier — Starter. Real, usable, not a fake trial that locks you out after two weeks. A creator can genuinely run on it. But it has honest limits: a small number of services, a cap on bookings per month. Enough to fall in love with the product. Not enough to run a serious business on forever.
A Creator tier and a Professional tier above it — paid, with the limits opening up. More services, more bookings, the room a growing creator needs.
The hard, philosophical part wasn't the prices. It was the free tier. There's a knife-edge there. Make it too generous and nobody ever pays — you've built a charity. Make it too stingy and it feels like a hostage situation, a demo that constantly nags you, and people resent it before they ever trust it. I kept asking: would I, personally, feel respected on this free tier, or manipulated? I want respected. I want someone to use the free version, genuinely benefit, and upgrade because they've outgrown it — not because I cornered them.
And here's the lever I'm most proud of, because it aligns my success with the host's success: commission. On the free tier, the platform takes a small
percentage of each booking. On paid plans, that drops to zero. Think about what that does. A free-tier host who's barely booking pays me almost nothing — fair, they're not making much. A host who's booking constantly is losing money to commission, and the moment that commission exceeds the subscription price, upgrading becomes the obvious, rational choice. They upgrade not because I forced them, but because the math finally favors it. I make money when they're small (tiny commission) and when they're big (subscription). The incentive is honest: I only win more when they win more.
One more decision, learned from PHP scars: I built the pricing — the tiers, the limits, the commission rates — so that I can change it from the admin side without touching code. Prices will need to move. Experiments will need running. If every price change is a code deploy, I'll be too scared to ever experiment. Make it a setting, not a release.
The question that kept me up wasn't "is the price right." It was the deeper, founder-level fear: will free people ever actually become paying people? I don't know yet. I've built the incentive to make it likely. But "likely" isn't "true," and I won't know which until real creators are on it, growing, hitting the limits, and deciding whether I'm worth it. That answer is weeks away, on the other side of launch.
For now, I have three honest tiers, a commission model that roots for my customers, and a pricing page I'm about to rewrite a dozen times because explaining all of this simply is its own nightmare. (It is. I rewrite it five times later. You'll hear about it.)
Tomorrow — the moment I've been building toward for two weeks. The first time a booking goes all the way through, end to end, on the new stack.