Which pricing model actually got you your first paying users?
Quick poll for builders:
What pricing got you your first $$?
A) Free → paid upgrade
B) Paid from day one
C) Lifetime deal
D) Freemium
E) Still figuring it out
Drop your product link + letter in the comments 👇
Free spot for indie products:
https://www.indieneed.com/submit
Like if you're mid-pricing-decision too.
D, but the answer depends on what the free tier teaches you.
We give away a full SEO audit — up to 2,000 pages, 100+ ranking factors, about 30 seconds, no signup. Paid tiers are £400/yr and £1,490/yr for ongoing monitoring. We are pre-revenue with single-digit monthly visits, so I cannot claim this has been validated yet.
The B advocate here is right that enthusiasm and a credit card are different signals. But in tooling where the product IS the demo, a free scan is the pitch. You cannot ask someone to pay four hundred pounds a year for a tool they have never run against their own site.
What matters is whether the free tier creates urgency. If a site owner sees 47 critical issues and still does not upgrade, that is useful data — it means the paid tier is not solving a pain they will spend money on. The free-to-paid conversion question is more specific than raw willingness to pay.
Still figuring it out!
Right now, I'm focusing on building and getting initial feedback on my project (Noor App – a distraction-free Islamic companion built with React) before slapping a price tag on it. Currently keeping it free to focus on UI polish and user retention.
Great thread to read through as I plan the roadmap!"
Keeping it free while you learn where retention comes from sounds reasonable. Once you see which users stick around, you’ll have a much better signal for what they’d actually pay for.
A useful split may be willingness-to-pay versus packaging: a paid pilot or concierge plan can validate value before committing to freemium. Did your first payer come through a direct conversation or a self-serve signup?
That’s a useful distinction. Direct conversations are usually the fastest way to test willingness to pay, then self-serve signup shows whether the packaging works without a sales assist.
B, and it is not close. Paid from day one is the only option that tells you whether the problem is real, because enthusiasm and a credit card are not the same signal, and most founders I have backed who started free then spent a year trying to retrofit a price onto people who had already decided the thing was free. I would take C off the list entirely: a lifetime deal is a loan from your future self at a terrible rate, and it teaches you nothing about what the product is actually worth.
I like the clarity of that test. Charging from day one does force the value question early, though I can see why a lifetime deal might work for a narrowly scoped launch if you’re careful about what you promise.