I killed two of my three pricing tiers before launch — the reasoning, and the bet I'm not sure about

I almost shipped the SaaS-default pricing: Free / Pro / Team. I launched with one paid tier instead. Here's the reasoning and the part I'm honestly still unsure about.

The options were a two-by-two. On tiers: Free / Pro / Team vs. a single paid plan. On the front door: free-forever vs. a reverse trial that drops people into Pro first and lets them fall back.

I took the lean corner of both:

• a reverse 14-day Pro trial — you land in the full product on day one

• a real free tier priced explicitly at $0/mo (not hidden, not "limited")

• one Pro tier above it, ~$8/mo. No Team plan, no seats.

The criterion that actually drove it wasn't conversion theory. It was that every tier is surface area I have to build, price, test, support, and explain — alone. A Team plan means seat management, invite flows, billing proration, and a whole support category, for revenue I have no evidence exists yet. As a solo dev, the second tier has to earn its complexity before it ships. It hadn't.

The part I'd reconsider: whether a generous $0 free tier quietly cannibalizes trial-to-paid. The reverse trial works because losing Pro stings. If free is comfortable enough, the sting goes away and so does the upgrade. I don't know which way that nets out — no paying users yet. It's a bet on simplicity, not a result I measured.

If you've run a reverse trial alongside a real free plan: did the free tier eat your conversions, or did the taste of Pro pull people up?