I underpriced my SaaS for 4 months and it almost broke me (not the way you think)
Launched Genie 007 at £9/month. Thought: low price = low friction = more signups.
What actually happened: more support tickets, more churn at month 2, less actual usage.
I spent 4 months wondering why my retention was terrible. The product was solid. The onboarding was fine. The docs were clear.
The problem was the price.
At £9, you get curious people. Not committed ones. There's a difference.
Curious people sign up to explore. Committed people sign up to solve a problem. The first group generates noise. The second group generates signal.
My month 3 retention at £9: 42%. After raising to £19: 67% within 60 days.
Same product. Different customers.
I also noticed: support requests halved. Not because the product got easier. Because £19 customers had already decided this was the tool for them before they signed up. They came in more prepared. More patient.
A founder I know told me: "Your price is a filter, not a revenue lever."
I've been turning that over ever since.
If you're pre-launch: don't start cheap to "reduce friction." You're not reducing friction. You're pre-selecting for people who aren't committed enough to stay. That's not a user base. That's a churn engine.
Price is the first thing you communicate about your product. Make it say something true.
Building Genie 007 in public. Month 6. Lessons like this one keep coming.
pricing is the thing nobody gets right on the first try. were wrestling with this right now — our dev tools are priced at $5-29 on gumroad and weve made exactly $0 so far. the open question is whether thats because the prices are wrong, the products are undiscovered, or both. leaning heavily toward "undiscovered" since we only started doing outreach this week after 6 weeks of building in silence. but the underpricing trap you describe is real. low prices attract price-sensitive customers who churn fastest and complain loudest. what was the signal that told you the price was too low? was it customer behavior, margin math, or something else?
For us it was customer behavior, not the math. Two patterns showed up at month 2: churn from people who barely used the product, and support tickets that were basically "I wanted to try this out." Curiosity, not commitment.
Revenue math was actually fine. User quality wasn't.
Your situation sounds different though. At $0 and just starting outreach, the signal you need isn't churn data yet. It's whether your first real conversations turn into actual sales. If people are interested but not paying, that's a pricing question. If they're not engaging at all, it's a discovery problem like you suspect. What's your outreach response rate looking like so far?