Topic
What to charge and how: price setting, billing models, and the confidence to raise.
Brett Williams sells design as a subscription with one request at a time and a 48-hour turnaround, alone. The price started at $449 a month in 2017 and took three years to pass $10k a month.
Emmanuel Crouvisier added a Pro tier to his credit card app at the last minute. Within a year it was earning more than his day job, on costs he puts in the hundreds per month.
World Bank purchasing power parity data gives you a defensible starting number for a regional price. Here it is for ten countries, next to what Cursor actually charged, plus the two mechanisms that ship a second price and the checkout dropdown that undoes one of them.
Provider cost reports group by workspace, model and day, never by your customer. The three layers of instrumentation that produce a per-customer number, with the exact fields to send and a worked conversion from one usage row to dollars.
Vassallo published a line-by-line accounting of two digital products: a 173-page PDF and a 100-minute video. It shows which tweet earned what, which price cut worked, and which channel he abandoned.
Three states have now written personalised pricing into statute, and New Jersey signed on 23 July. The scope differences, the exemptions that keep loyalty discounts legal, and an afternoon inventory of every field that touches your price.
Two engineers put in $3,000 each in 2012 and built a mattress company to $170 million in revenue. Their competitors raised hundreds of millions. The difference was what they did instead of raising.
Open-weight models served over API now cost 10-50x less than frontier flagships. The price map from providers' own pages, a worked monthly bill with a 100x spread, and a three-tier routing rule.
Cursor and Replit tore up flat pricing within weeks of each other, for the same reason: per-user costs vary by an order of magnitude. The math behind the pattern, and four structures that survive it.
Patreon cut 93 jobs while taking 10% of creator income. A fee comparison across Patreon, Substack and Ghost, and the question that matters more: who owns your subscriber billing?
Freelancers argue billing models like religions. The practical answer is a two-question matrix - how definable is the scope, how long is the engagement - plus a buffer rule for every fixed quote.
Founders anchor to early adopters, price for friction, then never revisit. Why underpricing compounds, what the evidence says, and a three-part method: cost floor, comparable band, and a scheduled reset.