Lessons from pricing our own products
Free tiers, subscriptions, one-time licences: what we have learned from pricing apps for very different audiences.
We sell a Mac utility, an SSH client, a collaborative web app and a clinic platform, to very different people. Pricing them taught us that there is no single right model, only a model that fits how each product creates value.
Match the price to the value
- Ongoing value suits a subscription: the product keeps working for you, syncing, hosting, improving.
- A solved problem suits a one-time licence: a small tool that does one job well and stays done.
- Offering both can work, if the choice is simple and honest about the difference.
A free tier is marketing
A free plan is how many people will first meet the product, so design it as carefully as the paid one. Decide on purpose what it leaves out: usually volume or collaboration, rarely the core experience that makes people want to pay.
“If customers need a calculator to understand your pricing, it is costing you sales.”
Clear before clever
Every extra tier, add-on and usage limit is a small reason to hesitate. Start with the simplest structure that fits the value, and only add complexity when customers are clearly asking for a different shape.
Written by the team at Bytelights, a product and AI studio in India.