This pricing advice will make you millions

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I receive at least 3 DMs about this every week:

Why do I not make it easy to try my products for free?

Almost every product I build requires a credit card before you can try the free tier.

Enter your card, start your trial, cancel anytime if it's not for you.

People tell me I'm leaving money on the table. That I'm scaring away potential customers. The industry standard is to let people hang around first without a card.

They're probably right - but I don't care.

Here's why it works for me, and why it might work for you, and how to think about pricing models 👇

Credit card required is a feature, not a bug

When you don't gate with payment, here's what happens:

Someone signs up. They click around for a few minutes. Then they leave.

But before they leave, they send you support emails asking questions that are answered in the docs they didn't read.

Multiply that by 500 free signups per week, and you're drowning in support tickets for people who were never going to pay. And by the way, my answer to this ticket will never be read too...

Well, here’s the thing:

We're a small team. Most of my products have only two people working on them (me and the co-maker). Only a couple of my products have three to four people, but none of them have more than that.

We can't handle a flood of people who aren't serious about testing the product.

Requiring a credit card creates commitment.

If you're willing to enter your card, you're not just curious.

You're serious about testing it.

And because you're serious, you actually set it up. You go through the configuration. You give it a real shot.

And that's where my team excels… creating actually valuable products for people who are serious about growing their business.

That means higher-quality feedback. Higher-quality users. And yes, a higher conversion rate from trial to paid.

The only trade off is the lower volume.

I'm okay with that. I'd rather have 100 serious trials than 1,000 people who sign up and ghost.

But this advice might not be for you. This works well for:

B2B products that need setup time

Complex tools that require configuration

Small teams that can't scale support infinitely

This doesn't work for:

Viral consumer apps where volume is the game

Simple tools where there's nothing to configure

Large teams with dedicated support infrastructure

Know which one you are before you change your model.

Quick ask: record your first Outrank.so experience We're giving away 100 backlink credits (worth $200) to people who record their first session using Outrank. If you're willing to record yourself going through it for the first time, reply to this email with your recording and i'll send you the credits. This helps us make it better for everyone 🙏🏼

Free tiers: marketing channel or charity?

I read this piece from a16z on optimizing free tiers and it made me think about what free actually does.

The question isn't "should we have a free tier?"

It's "what job is the free tier doing?"

If your free tier builds word-of-mouth and filters for people who will actually upgrade later, it's a customer acquisition cost.

You're simply paying (in server costs, support time, feature work) to find buyers.

If your free tier just services people who will never pay, it's charity.

AI products have real marginal costs now, so you can’t ignore this.

In 2019, a generous free tier for a SaaS tool cost you almost nothing. Storage is cheap. Compute is cheap. Serving another user costs pennies.

In 2026, every free interaction with an AI product costs real money. API calls aren't free.

This is why so many AI tools have deliberately hobbled free tiers. They're not being cheap - they're avoiding subsidizing infinite usage from people who will never pay.

The test: Does your free tier bring you people who eventually pay, or just people looking for free stuff?

If you can't answer that with actual data, you don't have a freemium strategy. You have a free product with some paying customers on the side.

A/B testing:

Everyone's heard of it, nobody does it.

This is the unsexy part.

I run hundreds of experiments. Because guessing what to do in business is really expensive.

Here's how it works:

Every new user who signs up gets assigned a variable. If the variable is 1, they see landing page A. If it's 2, they see landing page B and so on…

Then you track the success metric and see which one wins. Something like this:

Example from Revid.ai: we display the export button in multiple ways. Some variants make it bigger. Some change the copy. Some move it higher on the page.

We track exports per session. Whichever variant generates the most exports wins.

It's not complicated. But almost nobody does it.

You can test:

Landing page headlines

Pricing display (monthly vs annual first)

Feature prominence (what shows up in the dashboard)

Onboarding flows (how many steps, what order)

CTA copy ("Start free trial" vs "Try it now" vs "Get started")

The reason people don't A/B test is because it sounds technical and they think they need a big system.

You don't. You need a tool (we use PostHog & Amplitude), and you need to care about one metric at a time.

Pick the metric. Test the thing. Ship the winner. Move to the next test.

That's it.

The bootstrap reality:

Here's my "semi-controversial" take:

More indie hackers and small teams should make their apps fully paid and charge MORE, not less.

Because this is what happens in real life: someone launches at $9/month because they're scared nobody will pay $49/month.

Then they get 200 users paying $9, spend all their time on support, and can't afford to hire help.

Meanwhile, someone else launches at $99/month, gets 20 users, makes the same revenue, and has time to actually improve the product.

And here's the part nobody talks about: charging more forces you to build something better.

When people pay $99/month, they expect a product that actually works. That pressure is good. It makes you ship features that matter, fix bugs immediately, and care about performance.

$9/month lets you get lazy. $99/month doesn't let you hide.

I love that. It keeps me honest.

Freemium generates a massive support load. Every free user has questions. Every free user expects features. Every free user takes time.

If you're a team of 1-3 people, you can't handle that.

Make it paid. Make it expensive enough that only people who need it will pay.

For business software specifically - the $40 to $100 per month range works well. People at that price point expect ROI. If your product delivers, they stay. If it doesn't, they leave.

That's a clean signal.

If you're building consumer apps or tools for teenagers, this doesn't apply. Different game entirely. Lower prices, higher volume, different expectations.

But for B2B SaaS, which is what I build:

$99/month beats $9/month every time.

Conclusion

It's easy to read what works for other companies and try to copy it.

But those companies have different constraints than you do.

Build for the constraints you have, not the ones you wish you had.

Your constraints and resources decide how you should price the product, but there is one thing that's non negotiable:

Keep testing new things because that is what leads to compounded growth.

What's stopping you from raising your prices right now?

Reply and tell me, curious to read your thoughts 👇🏼

I read every email and reply often!

Tweet of the week

If you're afraid of embarrassing yourself, you've already lost.

That's it for this week.

Until next week,

Keep building

Tibo 💻

P.S. What's your favorite piece of pricing advice? Share it with me by replying to this email 👇🏼