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Why does most startup comes with a shitty pricing ramp nowadays?

Free plan : Because everybody does that and we don't give a crap if we are loosing money

Personal plan : More than 6x the monthly price of the personal plan of GitHub because our solution clearly worth that, trust us (also we need paying customers to sustain the free plan, that thing cost us like A LOt)

Enterprise plan : Yeah you know what that personal plan we totally get that it's too much so call us and we can arrange something. It's business after all it's not like you are a struggling indie dev or a startup hahaha.

When did it all go wrong?




Because the high price scares everyone away except for the customers you really want to focus on. That’s at least the theory you hear in many Ycombinator lectures.


For anyone who's genuinely curious about why the pricing ramp, here's the [an internal doc with some of the debate about the pricing plan](https://multiapp.notion.site/Pricing-What-should-we-charge-f...).

Link expires in 6 days. Most of the discussion is in the comments.

For anyone who doesn't want to load a ton of JS, in short:

# Free

Mostly pairing features. Free because we think that collaborative pairing functionality should be available to everyone, whether or not you can pay. If you're an individual contributor, you should just be able to sign up. Our closest competitor charges $30 a month for just pairing functionality, and as a result many small teams can't afford to use it.

# Standard

Mostly features to help with async communication and documentation. We think that distributed work in it's ideal is "Pair often, write a lot, and minimize meetings."

We think it makes sense to draw the paywall here because a/ The async features cost us more to run, and b/ This problem is something that team leaders or managers care about. And those are the people with credit cards.

We support teams having a mix of Free and Standard seats. Just pay for the power users.

# Enterprise

There are some features that cannot be per-seat: They have to be the whole team or nothing. For example, SSO (yes #ssoTax), API access, bespoke security review etc. For these, we can talk to the team about what their usage will look like in deciding the price.

Hope that helps. We're very open to feedback on this. DM's open at @embirico on Twitter if you have thoughts privately.


Counter argument, given economies of scale, smaller businesses should oftentimes have higher priced products.

Similar to local coffee shops charging more because they can’t afford bulk orders for 20mil cups.




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