[steveruizok]

Small teams are so hard to price for. When we first launched we had a non-commercial license and I was spending forever negotiating these tiny deals with teams where that was already a huge expense. The watermark solution we brought on last year fixed that problem but then anchored our price low for bigger companies. I’m sure half this forum has been through this. It’s so hard!

I expect we’ll do extended trial licenses for teams that are serious but just getting started, or are pre-revenue pre-funding; and there’s a hobby license for non-commercial projects. Pricing… never ends.

[abxyz]

isn’t this self-inflicted in that you’re making the purchase process a sales process for everyone, instead of being self-serve for the little guys? e.g: for teams under 10 people, let them sign up monthly with a per-team member fee. $50/month per team member feels like nothing compared to $6,000/year. I read $6,000/year as “we don’t want your business” because what startup is paying 1 year upfront for anything? They’ll probably be dead in 6 months.

There is a big difference between how startups buy and how enterprises buy, but it seems you’re treating them as equal in everything except budget.

Anyway, easy for me to say that, I have no stake. You know your customers… but as sales-aware observer, it seems very counterintuitive to make low budget people go through a sales process.

[steveruizok]

I'd like to do self-serve pricing like that, maybe we will in the future, but I don't think there are as many teams as you think where the difference would be a deciding factor.

When I was doing pricing discovery and asking early adopters what they would pay for tldraw, almost all the teams I talked to either said "nothing because we don't have any money yet" or a number between $5,000 and $10,000, with a handful of outliers. In the end, my solution was just to put a price on the thing and then find ways to provide for everyone else, including PRPF commercial teams. In 3.x our solution was a watermark, which caused other problems for us; but this discussion made it pretty clear to me that we need to have a better answer for these teams in 4.x.

That said, we've at least got the startup sales _process_ as close to self-serve as we can. Someone still needs to validate the size of the company and send a Stripe link, but 20% of startup licensees were delivered in under 24 hours and more than half are done in under a week.

[max1990]

I agree $6k upfront for startups is a lot (especially if they're just riffing).

But the bigger issue is there's no clarity of what this will cost if the startup works out and grows. So you spend a bunch of dev time building something that uses TLdraw and then its completely unknown if you can keep using it in the future as the cost could be $1 or $1 billion.

Any startup would be crazy to depend on a service with unknown pricing.

Sure you can email them and get the pitch by a salesperson, and use a bunch of time to get some long legal agreement with pricing in it somewhere, but that's what you do for massive custom-built enterprise tools. Not for on SDK in your stack. I don't think the opaque pricing model is common or viable for this kind of SDK. Imagine if payments providers or authorization providers or hosting all just had blank pricing and a "talk to us" button.