90,000/year enterprise platform aren't just different price points; they are fundamentally different companies with different teams, sales motions, and product roadmaps.
Get it wrong, and you kill a great product with a broken business model. Get it right, and pricing becomes a silent, automatic growth engine.
The Two Primal Sins of Pricing
Most founders commit one of two mistakes, both rooted in a lack of confidence.
- Fear-Based Pricing: You look at a competitor, guess they know what they're doing, and either copy their pricing or knock 20% off. This isn't a strategy; it's outsourcing your thinking to a rival who probably didn't do the work either.
- Cost-Plus Pricing: You calculate your server costs, add a margin for salaries and marketing, and call that your price. This sets a floor and ensures you don't lose money on a per-customer basis, but it completely ignores the most important factor: the value you deliver.
The best founders choose a third path: value-based pricing. This guide provides a tactical playbook for the four most important pricing models, how to pick one, and the non-obvious mistakes to avoid.
Model 1: Freemium (The Acquisition Model)
Freemium offers a basic version of your product for free, forever. Make no mistake: you are not choosing a revenue model. You are choosing a customer acquisition model. Your goal is flooding the top of your funnel, not near-term revenue.
When It Works
- Your Product Has Network Effects: The tool gets better for everyone as more people use it (e.g., Calendly, Figma). The free plan seeds this network.
- You're a B2B "Land and Expand" Play: A developer uses your API for free on a personal project, then gets their CTO to buy the enterprise plan. This is the heart of Product-Led Growth (PLG).
- Marginal Cost is Near-Zero: Supporting a new free user costs you almost nothing in infrastructure or support.
The Brutal Math of Freemium
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