Topic
Building and running subscription software: pricing, churn, retention, and the economics of recurring revenue.
Bannerbear's founder recorded the flat 18 months as carefully as the good ones. The two changes that ended the flat line were a rebuild as an API and a price that went from $9 to $49.
Damon Chen built Testimonial from the salvaged parts of projects that failed. The launch was a $199 lifetime deal to 30 people; the growth engine is a widget his customers put on their own sites.
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.
ShipFast took about a week to package and, per Starter Story, made $528,000 in four months. Lou's own public dashboard now shows it as the fifth line in his portfolio at $4.8k a month.
FeedbackPanda started as a script to save one online English teacher two hours a night. Two years later it had roughly 5,000 customers at $15 a month and a seven-figure exit.
The Eighth Circuit vacated the FTC's click-to-cancel rule on 8 July 2025. California's automatic renewal law is stricter on the one point founders care about, and it applies to any business with a California subscriber.
Kimi K3's open release landed on Hugging Face today. Published GPU rental and API prices put the crossover at roughly 4.2 billion tokens a month against Kimi's own API and 46 billion against DeepSeek V4 Pro. Here is the arithmetic, with the duty-cycle and caching adjustments most comparisons skip.
Published pricing for both tools, worked arithmetic on two commission structures at a $50 product, and the exact affiliate disclosure phrases the FTC calls adequate and inadequate.
Balsamiq launched in June 2008 and its founder reported profitability within three weeks. Eighteen years later it is still bootstrapped, and its 2024 revenue was $6.58 million, down 6%.
Before Zapier launched publicly, three founders in Missouri had already taken money from 800 people. The channel was free, public, and sitting in other companies' support forums.
In September 2014, ConvertKit was making $1,337 a month and looked finished. Thirteen months later it passed $30,000. The turnaround came from four decisions, none of them about the product.
OpenAI's worldwide outage this morning lasted about 50 minutes. The published uptime numbers say this is routine, the SLAs pay in credits, and a working fallback path is an afternoon of work rather than an architecture project.
Plausible Analytics crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue on June 2, 2022, three years after its first $64 month. The engine was written content aimed at a problem, not a product.
A new benchmark pushed Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY to 60,000 writes per second. The documented limits, the doorbell pattern, and the four conditions that actually justify a second system.
Merchants of record charge 5% plus 50 cents; a DIY Stripe and Stripe Tax stack runs about 3.4%. The worked math on what that 1.6-point spread buys, and who should pay it.
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.
Roughly a quarter of subscription churn isn't customers leaving - it's their cards failing. Benchmark data, the compounding math, and a recovery stack in priority order.
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.
Solo builders quietly accumulate overlapping AI subscriptions until the stack costs more than hosting. A four-step audit, inventory, overlap, per-use cost, subscribe-vs-API, for cutting spend without cutting capability.
For decades, 'solo founder' meant choosing which half of the company to neglect. The economics quietly changed. Here's what one person can realistically run in 2026, and where the ceiling still is.