The Correct Launch Price Is Free
Let’s get straight to the point: the correct launch price for your software is free. Every other price you could choose is a crippling mistake.
If you spend any time reading advice for entrepreneurs and bootstrappers, you’ll soon encounter discussion of whether you should price your product at $10 / month, $49 / month, $149 lifetime, and so on.
This advice is not for you! (Nor for me.) It does not generalize to your situation. Accepting this advice drastically decreases your chances of success.
For now, the only advice regarding price that you (or I) need is in the title: the correct launch price is free. But please keep reading, there is a newsletter signup below.
There are exactly two cases where free is not the correct price:
- When the cost of running your app makes free untenable, even short-term and at a minuscule scale. Rare for software, but possible.
- When you have the distribution problem solved. That is, you have thousands of website visitors, newsletter subscribers, or Twitter followers, and you can find your first paid customers by telling those about your product.
I agree; in both those cases free is the wrong launch price.
But I can safely say neither #1 nor #2 applies to you.
In particular, although there are people who have solved the distribution problem (#2), they are beyond rare and none of them read my website.
The problem is that while these people comprise a tiny portion of internet users, they’re also the ones offering 99.9% of the advice you read online. Their advice may be interesting, but at present, it’s irrelevant for you and me, because their problems are not our problems.
Their problem is: How do I get the most money from the people who are already buying my software? This is the problem that discussions of $10-per-month versus $49-per-month aim to solve.
Our problem is: How do I get a single person whatsoever to buy my software? And the solution is that you give it away for free.
Why free? Because it solves the distribution problem.
People love free products. You can flog your free products anywhere, anytime, as often as you want, and people will be grateful for it. Though they have never heard of you, they will sign up for your app in droves. They will thank you and compliment your work. A portion of them will become regular users.
But if you charge so much as $1 for your software, suffice it to say, such will not be your experience! Charging anything for your work raises the bar immeasurably. The modal outcome for unknown bootstrappers offering paid products is to move zero (0) units. Along with that, you will encounter some people who call you a grifter and ask you to take your sleazy self-promotion elsewhere.
Clearly, those people are imbeciles. There’s fundamentally nothing wrong with asking people to buy your stuff, although you can do it with more or less finesse. But I mention these imbeciles only to emphasize how differently people receive free and paid products.
I speak here from experience.
When I’m old and gray and a billionaire, I’ll look back and think of my first-ever sales on the internet (or anywhere else for that matter).
The product was “Tailwind Gym.” It’s a little app that used spaced repetition to teach Tailwind CSS selectors. I made it at work to onboard new hires bewildered by the tangle of Tailwind selectors all over our codebase. It worked so well that I spun it out into a product, complete with a $10 price tag.
Priced at $10, I might as well never have launched the thing. Precisely zero people paid or even signed up. Not only did I make no money, I also got no feedback, no referrals, no inbound links, no whiff of interest whatsoever.
This resounding failure convinced me Tailwind Gym was a bad product that would never make money, so I lowered the price to free and moved onto other things.
The landing page already got a steady trickle of traffic from me promoting the paid version on Reddit and Twitter. With the credit card barrier gone, these visitors began signing up. Many stayed to use the product. Apparently, some told their friends, because I started getting inbound traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn, and personal websites.
Within a few months of going free, Tailwind Gym reached a thousand signups all-time, with a much smaller (but significant, to me) group that stayed and used it regularly. I’d configured it originally to email me whenever someone new signed up. Seeing all those sign-up emails — at least a couple every day — convinced me to keep working on the product.
So I added some new features, more selectors, more customizability, and re-introduced the paywall. The core of the product remained free. Everything else could be had for a one-time payment of $50.
It was like turning on a firehose of cash. Sort of.
Of everyone who signed up, only a small handful paid. But because the product was free, many people were signing up. Somewhere between five and 20 paid each month. The site averaged almost $500 revenue monthly, with operating expenses verging on nil.
I decided against early retirement. But I appreciated receiving enough money to cover my car payment from a product that I originally thought was worthless.
I assume eventually I’ll have a million followers waiting breathlessly for my next product, loyally purchasing—pre-purchasing even!—each new thing I launch. I look forward to that day.
In the interim, my playbook is this:
- Launch free
- Get attention
- Layer on premium
I’m aware people will think I’m a dumbass for implementing this playbook myself and evangelizing it to others. The conventional wisdom is that freemium doesn’t work, that it attracts the worst customers, that there should be an impenetrable $49 wall in front of every webapp, and the only work worthy of a true product developer is getting people over that wall.
(Update: Already within a day of publishing this, I’ve received an email from someone with multiple thousands of Twitter followers, telling me—however politely—that this is dumb. Why he’s taking the time to email me, I can’t say.)
Consider those criticisms noted. I’m certain free is not actually the correct launch price for everybody. Perhaps you have thousands of followers and no problem getting attention for your work. In that case, I have nothing to tell you besides, well done.
Till I get there, everything I launch is free, at least in some capacity. My work is already sufficiently obscure; no sense hiding it behind a price tag as well.
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