First Paying Subscription!

I woke up to the best news I could expect for at this stage: an e-mail from Stripe saying that we have received our first paid subscription! This is important to us because we've managed to do it while keeping one of our main tenets: respect the little guy.

We built Insights (https://getinsights.io) partly because we found other analytics platforms to be almost disrespectful to non-paying users, and even to "start-up level" customers. Paywalls, arbitrary limits to using the app, complicated pricing. (The worst case for me, personally, was being asked to upgrade from the first paid tier to a version that costs a few hundred dollars more per month, in order to create a fourth funnel). Even our direct competitors in privacy analytics, which only support a few metrics, offer only paid tiers for their solutions.

We wanted to create something that could be used for free for any Indie Hacker like us, and that would bring them value. Our free plan is very generous, and so far only one user had gone over our monthly limits. We have had returning users for a few months now, and we were growing a bit worried about having been too generous with pricing. Just like everybody else here, we wanted validation that we were building something people would pay for.

But holding on to our tenets is paying off: we have other developers happy to be able to use the tool for free on smaller websites without giving data to Google, and now we are starting to get users which get enough traffic on their website to justify paying for the tool. This is only the beginning, of course, but it's something I'm very glad to see validated: there is no harm in being generous with your users.