Which pricing model actually got you your first paying users?
Quick poll for builders:
What pricing got you your first $$?
A) Free → paid upgrade
B) Paid from day one
C) Lifetime deal
D) Freemium
E) Still figuring it out
Drop your product link + letter in the comments 👇
Free spot for indie products:
https://www.indieneed.com/submit
Like if you're mid-pricing-decision too.
B for us, we charged from day one even though the first price was almost embarrassingly low. The free tier we tried earlier mostly attracted people who were never going to pay, so the signal was pure noise. Curious if anyone here got A working without the free users eating all your support time?
That’s the tradeoff with free: it can widen the funnel, but it can also create a lot of support noise before you know who has real intent. I’d keep a close eye on the moment free users hit a meaningful limit, since that’s usually the clearest test of whether the model is working.
Honestly, I don't know, I'm still in the development phase.
That’s a perfectly reasonable answer while you’re still building. You can still test the pricing question before everything is finished by showing a narrow workflow, asking for a deposit, or offering a small paid pilot. What kind of product are you working on, and which part is closest to being useful?
I'm building ProgressionLine: a web app that generates progress bar images for X, and can auto-post them on a schedule (e.g. a year countdown).
The generator and the automation both work today on my two test accounts. The automation is the part closest to being useful, and it's what people would actually pay for.
I can't take deposits yet (no legal entity), so I'm planning a founding-members waitlist where people pick the plan they'd pay for. Would that be a good enough signal, or would you push for real payments first?
B for us, but by accident. Free listings on 15 marketplaces reached 875 people and brought $0. The only sales came from a paid-from-day-one listing that gets about one click every ten days. Buyers who arrive already holding a budget seem to convert no matter how few there are. Did your free tier users ever turn into paid ones, or did the payers show up separately?
That is a useful pricing lesson: a smaller audience with an existing budget can beat a much larger pool of free attention. I would treat free users as a separate funnel and watch whether they reach a clear paid trigger, rather than assuming reach will turn into upgrades on its own.
Also in the zero-reviews boat — I’m building SoftShelf and just shipped a small $9.99 Excel/Sheets debt payoff planner (snowball vs avalanche compare, capped at 6 debts on purpose). I’m curious what made people buy your first unit with no social proof. Link if useful: https://grokbear.gumroad.com/l/eqdyqi?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=first_sale&utm_content=comment
Quick link fix (username changed): https://softshelfstudio.gumroad.com/l/eqdyqi?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=first_sale&utm_content=comment_fix
With no social proof, a narrow use case and a very concrete outcome can make the first sale easier than trying to sell a broad promise. The debt payoff planner is nicely specific, and you can also submit SoftShelf here if you want another place for indie makers to find it: https://www.indieneed.com/submit
D, but the answer depends on what the free tier teaches you.
We give away a full SEO audit — up to 2,000 pages, 100+ ranking factors, about 30 seconds, no signup. Paid tiers are £400/yr and £1,490/yr for ongoing monitoring. We are pre-revenue with single-digit monthly visits, so I cannot claim this has been validated yet.
The B advocate here is right that enthusiasm and a credit card are different signals. But in tooling where the product IS the demo, a free scan is the pitch. You cannot ask someone to pay four hundred pounds a year for a tool they have never run against their own site.
What matters is whether the free tier creates urgency. If a site owner sees 47 critical issues and still does not upgrade, that is useful data — it means the paid tier is not solving a pain they will spend money on. The free-to-paid conversion question is more specific than raw willingness to pay.
That’s a good point—the free audit can be both the demo and the qualification step, but the upgrade only happens if it makes the cost of inaction obvious. With discovery still the main bottleneck, you could also submit it here for a bit more indie-maker exposure: https://www.indieneed.com/submit
The cost of inaction framing is something we have not tried explicitly. Right now the free scan shows what is wrong but does not quantify what it costs. If the report said these 47 missing alt tags are costing you an estimated X percent of image search traffic rather than just listing them, the upgrade pitch writes itself. That is probably the next thing we build into the paid tier — not more data, but a dollar figure on ignoring it.
That sounds like a stronger upgrade prompt than adding another list of issues. If the estimate is transparent about its assumptions, putting a plausible cost on inaction could make the value much easier to understand—and give you a clearer test of whether the paid tier is solving an urgent problem.
Still figuring it out!
Right now, I'm focusing on building and getting initial feedback on my project (Noor App – a distraction-free Islamic companion built with React) before slapping a price tag on it. Currently keeping it free to focus on UI polish and user retention.
Great thread to read through as I plan the roadmap!"
Keeping it free while you learn where retention comes from sounds reasonable. Once you see which users stick around, you’ll have a much better signal for what they’d actually pay for.
A useful split may be willingness-to-pay versus packaging: a paid pilot or concierge plan can validate value before committing to freemium. Did your first payer come through a direct conversation or a self-serve signup?
That’s a useful distinction. Direct conversations are usually the fastest way to test willingness to pay, then self-serve signup shows whether the packaging works without a sales assist.
B, and it is not close. Paid from day one is the only option that tells you whether the problem is real, because enthusiasm and a credit card are not the same signal, and most founders I have backed who started free then spent a year trying to retrofit a price onto people who had already decided the thing was free. I would take C off the list entirely: a lifetime deal is a loan from your future self at a terrible rate, and it teaches you nothing about what the product is actually worth.
I like the clarity of that test. Charging from day one does force the value question early, though I can see why a lifetime deal might work for a narrowly scoped launch if you’re careful about what you promise.