How to approach pricing when features are in progress?
Hey there, so let me set the scene for you.
Solo indie hacker here who recently built a tool to help with managing tabs. I have a vision for the product but for now, it's got only one major feature, and that's to schedule tabs for later.
I want to start charging, but I'm aware that I'll be building more features in the upcoming few months. It will take some time since I'm a team of one, but slowly but surely I'll get there.
So here's my question. What's the best approach to charging? Considering I have a few flag features in the works. I don't feel right charging for something that doesn't exist yet. At the same time, it feels weird changing the price as I introduce new features.
Here's a quick rundown of the roadmap:
- ✅ Scheduling Tabs for Later: Developed
- ❌ Saving Links with Tag Organization: In progress
- ❌ Keeping track of notes across multiple tabs: Ideation
As reference: here's this product that only focuses on my first major feature: https://tabsnooze.com/pro. They charge $2.99 / month. So this gives me a baseline of where to start.
What would you recommend? What examples have you seen in the wild that would reflect my current situation?
Indie hackers selling to indie hackers?
If it's a one-time payment, you can get clues from Desktop Apps. They charge for upgrades to major changes once a year. New customers start paying the new price, old customers can upgrade for a small fee.
If it's a recurring payment, I would strongly suggest keeping your early adopters at initial price without forcing them to change to a new tier. They will be your brand ambassador for life.
thanks for your feedback, yeh as an early user with products I've used, I liked it where I kept the original price tier.
only after years of using it and license upgrades I was happy to pay for the new price.
There's one example that comes to mind where early users had a price change and I was ok with it and that was https://copilot.money/ for budgeting.
My takeaway from their approach was that they shared why the price increase was happening. From the top of my head, it was small team, new features, active development.
In any case, for my product, I'll likely keep the pricing tier the same for early users.
from a very quick look, copilot looks like a very mature app. so my recommendation is to go slow on this.
for sure, gotta take one step at a time.
since I last posted my question. I decided to hold on pushing a pricing strategy and instead focus on pushing my alpha and getting product-market fit
this is something I've been trying to work through a lot as well, and appreciate the concern you're putting into this! My only thoughts here are to not try to scope out the product/features/roadmap/pricing so strictly, as you might end up iterating away from what you originally thought you were building as you get feedback from users. So I would start with launching something that has an informed price point (based off WTP/competitors/etc.) and going from there.
I used to have a lot of anxiety about increasing prices, but we decided to never change a price on a user on their existing product and instead plan on offering additional features at higher price points. I also felt less anxiety around this when I noticed how much prices actually change and get updated for different online products (e.g. Zendesk, they've never forced us to pay more, but are continually creating new subscription tiers)
good luck with this, and would love to hear how it goes!
great point, actually takes me back to my first objective but lost track as I've been delaying my release due to a chrome bug (more on that here). This "unfortunately", gave me some time to think about the next steps. But you make a great point, I need to focus on user feedback to understand what I should be building instead. Just gotta release my extension! very soon, very soon...
I was thinking about having an early bird pricing and as I add new features increase the price, but early bird users would maintain the same price. This is something I'll play around with and share as I figure out what works best! I'll keep you posted for sure
thanks for giving me tips and insights on how to approach this! 🚀
an idea I had was to give "Early Bird" prices, that cover the existing feature and the features in progress. Maybe by explaining on the pricing page that there are more features coming soon?
maybe?