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.
Also in the zero-reviews boat — I’m building SoftShelf and just shipped a small $9.99 Excel/Sheets debt payoff planner (snowball vs avalanche compare, capped at 6 debts on purpose). I’m curious what made people buy your first unit with no social proof. Link if useful: https://grokbear.gumroad.com/l/eqdyqi?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=first_sale&utm_content=comment
With no social proof, a narrow use case and a very concrete outcome can make the first sale easier than trying to sell a broad promise. The debt payoff planner is nicely specific, and you can also submit SoftShelf here if you want another place for indie makers to find it: https://www.indieneed.com/submit
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.
That’s a good point—the free audit can be both the demo and the qualification step, but the upgrade only happens if it makes the cost of inaction obvious. With discovery still the main bottleneck, you could also submit it here for a bit more indie-maker exposure: https://www.indieneed.com/submit
The cost of inaction framing is something we have not tried explicitly. Right now the free scan shows what is wrong but does not quantify what it costs. If the report said these 47 missing alt tags are costing you an estimated X percent of image search traffic rather than just listing them, the upgrade pitch writes itself. That is probably the next thing we build into the paid tier — not more data, but a dollar figure on ignoring it.
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.