Pricing your listing
Never let a buyer's bill depend on something you cannot cap. Unbounded inference cost is a refund waiting to happen.
Pick a pricing model you will not regret at ten times your current volume.
How Pricing your listing works, in one picture
The same argument as the text, as a chain. Each step is what makes the next one possible.
- 1
Match the model to how the value arrives
One-time suits something a buyer installs and keeps, where your cost after the sale is close to zero. Subscription suits something that keeps working and that you keep maintaining. Metered suits something whose cost to you scales with use.
Free is a real strategy here rather than a failure. A free, verified, widely installed server is the best possible advertisement for the paid one next to it.
- 2
Never eat unbounded inference
If your software calls a model, its cost is a function of what the buyer feeds it, and buyers feed software things you did not imagine. A fixed price on an unbounded cost is a business that gets worse as it succeeds.
Either pass the metered cost through with your margin on top, or bundle it with a stated cap and say what happens past the cap. Both are honest. Silence is not.
This is the most common way a first listing turns into a refund and a bad review at the same time.
- 3
Show the whole price
Everything a buyer will pay appears on the card, before they click. No fee first appears at checkout, on this site or in the law in a growing number of places.
Hidden costs are the largest single cause of abandoned checkouts anywhere online, at around four in ten. Showing the total early costs you nothing and is the highest returning thing you can do to your own listing.
- 4
Read your interest signal before you set a number
Your listing analytics, and the requests boardEvery listing shows how many people said they want it and how many passed. A high want count with a high pass count usually means the idea is right and the price is not.
The requests board is the other half of this. People ask there for things that do not exist yet, and other people vote. It is the cheapest market research available to you and it costs nothing to read.
You have a price, and you can say what happens to your margin at ten times the volume.
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