Decided not to put a public price on my new tier. taking "founding customers" instead -here's the thinking
Shipped a self-hosted version of my product recently and hit the question every founder hits: what do i charge for it.
and i realized i had no business answering that yet.
i have opinions on the price. i did the competitor research, i know roughly where it should land. but opinions aren't data. the only real signal for "is this the right price" is an actual person saying yes and paying — and i don't have that yet. so setting a public number right now would just be me guessing, loudly, in a way that's hard to walk back.
so i'm doing the founding-customer thing instead. bring on a small handful of early customers, no public price, locked-in early rate for them, and figure out the actual number with them instead of guessing alone. they get a deal, i get real pricing data and real feedback on where the product falls short. seems more honest than pretending i already know.
the part i keep going back and forth on: a public price page is a credibility signal. "talk to us for pricing" can read as either premium-and-deliberate or as i-have-no-idea-what-i'm-doing, depending on how you frame it. i'm betting that being upfront - "i'm figuring this out with my first customers, here's why" - reads as the honest version rather than the clueless one. but i'm not sure.
so for the room:
- when you launched, did you set a public price from day one, or figure it out with early customers first? which would you do again?
- does "no public price, talk to me" make you trust a product more or less as a buyer?
- for anyone who did founding-customer / lifetime / locked-in early deals — did it help or did it bite you later?
(and if you happen to be someone who'd actually want a self-hostable version of this kind of infra - data sovereignty, no lock-in — feel free to say so, but mostly i'm after the pricing wisdom.)
We ended up with a hybrid by accident. The framework (Kumiko) is open-source, so self-hosting has always been free — the pricing question only applies to the hosted platform, which is B2B. For that: founding customers, no question. You need the conversation before you need the number.
B2B in general: "talk to us for pricing" reads as deliberate, not clueless — especially for infra. The buyer expects it.
B2C is trickier. If someone lands on your page and there's no price, they're gone. Consumer products need a number up front, even if it's wrong.
On lifetime/locked-in deals: cap the volume. Five founding customers at a steep discount is great data. Fifty is a pricing mistake that compounds.