SaaS pricing for solo founders
Price is not a reward you earn once the product is good. It decides, before you write a line of code, whether one person can run this at all.
The short version
- Price sets your customer count, and customer count sets your support load. That is the whole constraint.
- $20–79 per month is the solo band for B2B. Below it the arithmetic does not close.
- Charge per outcome or per seat, not per feature. Feature tiers punish your best customers.
- Two plans, maybe three. Every extra plan is a decision you have handed to the buyer.
- Raise prices for new customers only. Grandfathering costs little and buys enormous goodwill.
What should a solo founder charge?
For B2B software, $20 to $79 a month is the band where the arithmetic works. It is high enough that a few dozen customers is a real income, and low enough that a small business can approve it without a procurement conversation.
The instinct is to price low because the product is new and you feel unproven. That instinct optimises for your comfort and against the business. A low price does not make the product easier to sell; it makes the company impossible to run.
Why does a low price break a one-person business?
Because support scales with customers, and customers scale inversely with price. At $5 a month you need hundreds of people to make a living, and hundreds of people generate more questions, bugs and refunds than one person can answer while still building.
| Price | Customers for $3,000 MRR | Support reality |
|---|---|---|
| $5 | 600 | A full-time support job, unpaid |
| $19 | 158 | Most of your week |
| $49 | 61 | Manageable alongside building |
| $99 | 30 | You know them by name |
Thirty customers is a number one person can find by hand, serve properly and keep. Six hundred is a company with a support team, and you are not that. The price is what decides which of those two businesses you are building.
How do you pick the number?
Anchor it to what the problem costs today. If a customer spends four hours a month on the thing you automate, and their hour is worth $50, you are competing with $200 of pain. Charging $49 against that is an easy decision for them and a sustainable one for you.
Three anchors, in order of how well they hold up in a sales conversation:
- Hours saved × their hourly cost. The most defensible, and the easiest for a buyer to check.
- The tool or contractor you replace. A named number they already pay.
- Revenue enabled or lost. Strongest when true, weakest when guessed.
Never price against your effort. How long the build took is invisible to the buyer and irrelevant to the value. Two weeks of work that saves someone four hours a month is worth more than six months that saves them none.
How many plans should you have?
Two, or three at most. Every additional plan is a decision you are asking the buyer to make on your behalf, and buyers who cannot decide leave. Two plans with an obvious difference converts better than four with subtle ones.
The cleanest split for a solo product is by usage or seats rather than by features. Feature gating means your most engaged customers keep hitting walls, which is the wrong group to frustrate: they are the ones who would have referred you.
Annual billing at roughly ten months for twelve is worth offering from the start. It improves cash flow, and customers who pay annually churn far less because they have committed rather than drifted.
When and how do you raise prices?
When the product has visibly improved, and for new customers only. Grandfathering existing subscribers costs you very little revenue and buys goodwill you cannot buy any other way: the people on the old price become the ones who recommend you.
Announce the increase before it happens, say what changed to justify it, and give the current price a deadline. That is a plan, and buyers accept plans. A silent increase discovered on a card statement is how a small product acquires a bad reputation quickly.
Frequently asked questions
Should I offer a free plan?
Usually not, as a solo founder. A free tier multiplies support load and infrastructure cost without revenue, and free users convert far worse than trial users.
How long should a trial be?
Seven to fourteen days, and only long enough for the user to reach the moment the product proves itself. Longer trials mostly delay the decision rather than improve it.
Should I ask for a card up front?
It reduces sign-ups and raises conversion, because the people who enter a card are the people who intend to buy. For a solo founder with limited support capacity, that trade is usually worth it.
What about lifetime deals?
They are borrowing from the future at a bad rate: you take one payment and owe support forever, which is the opposite of what recurring revenue is for.
Is usage-based pricing better?
It aligns price with value, which customers like, but it makes your revenue unpredictable and your billing code complicated. For a first product, flat plans are almost always the right call.
The system behind this, written down
Everything above is the map. The Income Loop is the work inside it: modules 0–6 from the problem you solve to the offer that pays for it, plus ten traffic paths: the deeper post banks, the content sales systems and the full software build sequence, in one place.
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