What I Charge and Why (Pricing Across 4 Shipped Products)

Most "how to price your SaaS" content is written by people who've priced one product, once, and are guessing at the rest. I've now done this across 4 shipped software products (+ 2 other product experiments), and the pattern that actually works is boring: price low enough that the decision to subscribe barely registers, and make sure the product costs close to nothing to keep alive so a small number of subscribers is already a real business.

Why I don't chase a high price point

A solo-run product doesn't have a sales team talking someone into a higher tier. The price has to be low enough that someone converts off a single read of the pricing page, with nobody there to answer objections. That's a different pricing problem than a funded startup with a sales motion has, and most pricing advice online is written for that other problem, not this one.

Insidr Pro is $25/month, or $240/year. I kept it at $25 instead of dropping to $19, on purpose. $19 is the reflexive "friction-free impulse" price everyone defaults to, but it also reads as a toy — and Insidr is data people use to actually watch what insiders and Congress are trading with their own money, not a novelty. $25 is still an easy yes for anyone who cares about the category, and it's a round number instead of a fake-precision $24.99 — I'd rather the price look like a decision than a psychology trick. The annual price works out to $20/month effectively, so the "monthly is fine, annual saves you real money" math does the persuading instead of a discount banner.

Why "barely costs anything to keep alive" is the actual target

Worth splitting this into two numbers, because they're not the same thing. What it costs me to build with AI tools — Claude and Cursor subscriptions — is around $45/month, and that's shared across everything I ship, not per product. What it costs to actually keep one running once it's live is closer to $20-25/month: Vercel hosting plus Resend for email, and Resend's free tier covers it at this scale. That second number is the one that matters for "does this need to be a big business to be worth doing" — a lean product's actual keep-alive cost is close to nothing.

When the cost to run something is close to zero, the math on whether it's "worth it" stops being about hitting a big number and starts being about whether a handful of people find it useful enough to pay for. That's a much easier bar to clear alone.

Annual vs monthly

Insidr has both: $25/month or $240/year. That's a real discount — $240 versus $300 if you paid monthly for twelve months, so the annual plan is effectively a free month. Too early to tell yet whether it's actually moved the needle on retention; I haven't run it long enough to have real churn data to point to.

The pricing mistake I'd tell someone starting out to skip

Don't price based on what competitors charge if you don't know their cost structure — a funded competitor with different unit economics charging $49/month tells you nothing about what you should charge running solo. Price against your own actual costs and your own actual audience's willingness to decide fast, not against a number you saw on someone else's pricing page.