Ask HN: Recommended resources for pricing digital products/services?
What to price the things I make feels too much like guesswork to me. I would love to know any recommended advice for how to price digital products and services. How did you come up with the price for your project?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2022 where @TheStagHeart 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 Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 44 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 8 comments
Some resources I've collected about pricing:
https://cranberryblog.substack.com/p/a-simple-argument-for-investing-in
https://zimtik.com/en/posts/lessons-learned-on-saas-pricing
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/payback-period
https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/07/01/dont-insult-me-with-your-pricing.html.html
https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/restaurant-prices/
http://justinmares.com/why-real-businesses-dont-charge-5month
https://adilaijaz.medium.com/6-questions-to-ask-before-adopting-usage-based-pricing-77bf2a669309
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/saas-pricing-strategy
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/29/subscription-based-pricing-is-dead-smart-saas-companies-are-shifting-to-usage-based-models/
https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/don-t-charge-a-month-for-your-product/
https://danmorozoff.substack.com/p/ai-reversion-to-the-old-days-software
Take a look at this video of Michael Dearing on pricing.
https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/harrison-metals-michael-dearing-on-pricing/
The website is really weird: there's no obvious way to play the video. Clicking on a word or paragraph plays the video at that place. So you can click on the letter "I" in the first sentence "I was just telling the" of the first paragraph.
I suppose you can directly access the video here: https://d3aeja1uqhkije.cloudfront.net/2013-07-16-michael-dearing/2013-07-16-michael-dearing.mp4
The book Monetizing Innovation is a book all about pricing [0]. It's a great read. I'd also recommend this talk by Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman, who talks about pricing with regards to product market fit [1].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Design-Product-ebook/dp/B01F4DYY1I
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhDj_C4Qzhk
Saved this from HN a while back: https://neildavidson.com/downloads/dont-just-roll-the-dice-2.0.0.pdf
Also from patio11: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pricing