Most founders think they're making their lives easier by selling something for cheap, when in fact they're making their lives harder.

I like to think about "cheap" customers through the following lens:

Price is, roughly, an estimate of the value of something. The more expensive something is, the more certain you can be that the customers find it valuable. The converse is also true (generally).

Ideally, you want your customers to find what you're doing valuable, right? Then they're less likely to churn, more likely to rave about it, more likely to put effort into using it, more likely to give you meaningful feedback, etc. If you want these things, you need to sell them something valuable, which is in all likelihood going to be expensive.

The alternative is to sell something cheap (which means customers probably won't find it valuable) and then wonder why customers aren't making it an integral part of their lives, coming back to it every day, continuing to pay monthly, etc.

Both are surviving

trademark pending from patio11 😝

Generally, people pay not based on the complexity of your solution to their problems, but based on the value they get from that solution. That value is limited by the scope of the problem itself. So my advice is always to pick the most valuable problems from the get-go.

Okay, that's a bit airy-fairy and theoretical. How about a practical example:

Let's say you build a task app for consumers to track things in their everyday lives. You spend 5 years on it, and it is perfection. It's got the slickest UX, the best integrations, it's powerful, it's easy to use, it's fast, it's everything. Guess what? Most people still aren't going to pay more than $5 or $10/month for it, because most people don't find task management all that valuable in their personal lives. You're going to have to find 1000s of customers (hard) or tailor your product to a niche that will allow you to charge more.

Alternatively, let's say you start a company that helps tech companies hire developers. You've only worked on the site for 6 months, and it's suuuuper freaking simple. Maybe it's just a blog. But whatever it does, it's pretty good at attracting talented developers. Guess what? Companies will pay you hundreds of dollars to get in front of those developers and/or thousands of dollars per successful hire, depending on your business model. Developers cost them upwards of $150k to hire, so a $1k finders fee is nothing. Hiring is a valuable problem for them. You can hit ramen profitability from just a handful of customers per month.

Okay, this is still super high-level. Let me talk about your question more specifically:

Should you give a 50% price reduction early on? Sure. Something like this won't matter in the grand scheme of things, especially since it's only temporary and only in the early days. I would be surprised if this decision affects your business in the long term.

What I'm more concerned about is your statement, "I plan to increase the price as the value of my product for the customer increases." That's perfectly fine, as long as you don't fall into the trap of boxing yourself in by solving a problem that's not very valuable. Then it doesn't matter how much code you write in the future, your new pricing tiers will still be relatively cheap.

In my experience it is TOTALLY OKAY to discount for early access, so long as the thing you are selling actually solves a problem that people would pay full price to solve.

Early Access discounts, founding customer clubs, etc are great ways to reward people buying in early (and positioning the discounted price against a premium price that others will have to pay later).

It's very difficult to compete on price as an indie hacker. Usually cost savings come from economies of scale (i.e. being a huge company and controlling lots of resources), or from raising a ton of money and being able to sell at a loss for a while. So I would discourage most IHers from making price their value prop :-D