I’ve been building MVPs for founders for many years now. I come in, build the core product, get it into the hands of the first users, and then I usually stick around to see what happens.
And I see the same mistake, over and over, that quietly strangles promising products right after they start getting traction.
It’s the pricing. Specifically, the default, lazy decision to charge per user.
Here's the pattern I see play out. I'll build a slick collaboration tool for a founder. They sell it to a company. A team of five starts using it, and they absolutely love it. The tool works so well that they become hyper-efficient and don't need to hire more people.
From a product development standpoint, that's a massive win. I just built something that made a team better at their jobs. But for the founder? They just got punished for having a great product. The potential to grow that account is now capped.
It gets worse. The team's manager, the champion of my work, goes to another department and tells them they have to start using this tool. But the first question from the other department head is, "What's the cost per seat?" Adding another 15 users creates a budget discussion, and the idea dies right there.
The product I built is now stuck in a silo, all because the pricing model makes it hard to share. I've literally watched my work get quarantined inside a business because of a pricing decision made in the first month.
Last year, I built a project management tool for a client. We launched it, and it was beautiful. So effective that teams using it were getting more done with fewer people. Six months later, the founder calls me, frustrated that revenue has completely flatlined.
We dug into the usage data together. The real value wasn't the number of people logging in. It was the number of active projects being managed.
I spent a weekend rewriting the billing logic to be based on project volume, with unlimited users. It wasn't a huge technical challenge. But the business impact was immediate. Revenue jumped 40% in six months because the cost was now tied to the value they were getting. And since adding users was free, the tool spread like wildfire inside their customer accounts.
I'm a developer. My job is to build things people want to use. It just feels fundamentally wrong to then implement a business model that punishes them for using it too much.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why is per-user pricing still the default? Is it just the easiest thing to code? I’m curious what other devs and founders have seen work better.