Why I ditched tiers and went with flat per-agent pricing

When I started building SupportLayer I assumed I'd follow the standard helpdesk pricing playbook — a free tier, a growth tier, a pro tier, each unlocking more features as you pay more. It's what every competitor does, so it felt like the safe choice.

The more I looked at it, the less sense it made.

The features that get gated behind expensive tiers — SLA management, role-based permissions, MFA enforcement, compliance reporting — aren't power-user extras. They're the fundamentals of running a professional support operation. Locking them away felt like charging people extra to do their job properly.

I also noticed something uncomfortable: tiered pricing creates a weird incentive. You're essentially motivated to withhold features from lower-paying customers, which means your cheaper plans are intentionally worse. That felt like the wrong foundation for a product.

So I scrapped the tiers entirely. Every feature, every account, one price. $12 per agent per month, first agent always free.

The pushback I expected was "you're leaving money on the table." Maybe. But the counter-argument is that simple, honest pricing is itself a differentiator in a market where buyers are used to being nickel-and-dimed. When someone lands on the pricing page and sees one number with no asterisks, no "contact us for enterprise pricing," no feature comparison matrix full of padlocks — that's a relief. That relief is worth something.

The other concern was whether $12 was too cheap to be taken seriously. I spent a while on this. I tested $9, which felt too low — more side project than product. I landed on $12, which puts me roughly 20% below Freshdesk's entry paid tier and a fraction of Zendesk, while still feeling like a credible price for a business tool.

Early days yet, but the feedback so far has been that the pricing is the first thing people mention positively. Not the features, not the UI — the pricing. Which tells me the market is more frustrated with how competitors charge than I'd even realised.

Would love to hear from anyone else who's wrestled with pricing decisions — especially whether you've found tiers worthwhile or whether simplicity won out.