Ask HN: Do you "Pricing" for your startup?
Does your startup ask for money? If not, why have you decided to give away your work for free, while it is clear that most startups that do so end up quitting.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2009 where @rokhayakebe convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 5 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 3 comments
Most startups end up quitting, period, regardless of whether they charge money or not.
That said, you'll find no argument from me that startups should sell money. Ignore the "you're giving your work away for free" angle -- the world at large and your customers in particular don't give mouse droppings about you, they care about themselves and their life and how your product improves those lives.
Charging money helps your product improve their life. It communicates value -- it automatically sets your product above 99% of the Internet because 99% of the Internet is free and everyone has learned by experience that most things that are free are free because they provide less than one penny of value.
Charging money gives people the confidence that your website is on the level. You have a clear rationale for providing the service and for being around next week. It is amazing any commerce on the Internet happens at all with the pervasive lack of trust people have for new websites. Asking for money (combined with many other things you'll be doing while asking for money) helps to build trust, by giving people a familiar, comfortable role to slide into in their emerging business relationship with you. They figure "Hey, if I pay them money, then I'll be the customer, and customers typically get what they want."
Charging money tells people that if something breaks (and something always breaks) that you'll be around to fix it.
Charging money says this product will merit future investment. Charging money says this product has a future.
i have a project that is free and a project that is freemium.
freemium project is freemium because it is more time and labor intensive, as well as resource-intensive. if i didn't charge, i would be in debt.
the free one is free because it is simple, easy, many times less resource intensive, and i can devote as little time as i want to it while it still generates me some revenue.
We based our pricing on a hybrid of cost vs competitors. We want to be an affordable solution, and we know approximately what our competitors unit price is.
Since we are monthly subscription based we figured out a good price point that would make us profitable, yet undercut our competition by a wide margin.