Every resource founders actually use, in one library.

What founders use most, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

1. A first-person founder account from Buffer's CEO on choosing to put their pricing (and the costs behind it) fully in the open,... Buffer Essay · Starting Up Introducing Transparent Pricing: What Your Money is Used for When You Purchase a Buffer Subscription Joel Gascoigne
2. Dan Balcauski is a full-time pricing operator, and this episode gets concrete about the machinery behind serving different... Better Done Than Perfect podcast Podcast · Podcast episode, around 30 to 40 minutes · Starting Up Pricing and Packaging for SaaS with Dan Balcauski Better Done Than Perfect (Userlist), with Dan Balcauski
3. This is the canonical piece on packaging one product into three tiers so it stretches across price-sensitive and premium buyers... Harvard Business Review Article · Article, around 10 to 12 minute read · Starting Up The Good-Better-Best Approach to Pricing Rafi Mohammed
4. When your product is half built, the temptation is to give it away and hope revenue comes later. Ash Rust argues the opposite:... Medium Essay · ~8 min read · Starting Up Startup Sales: How to Charge your First 5 Customers Ash Rust
5. This is the practical companion to charging early: how to set a first customer rate you can raise later without making early... The Bootstrapped Founder Article · ~10 min read · Starting Up Your Initial Pricing Will Never Be Right, But Try Anyway Arvid Kahl
6. This lays out the exact tension in the question: a lifetime deal hands you $50k to $500k today, but those buyers keep consuming... Dodo Payments Article · about 8 min read · Starting Up Why Lifetime Deals (LTDs) are a Double-Edged Sword for SaaS Aarthi Poonia
7. An Indian founder recounts running lifetime deals twice, selling $500k to 4,000 buyers on AppSumo, and then living with what... B2B SaaS Podcast Podcast · about 35 min listen · Starting Up How I sold lifetime deals worth $500k on AppSumo & why you should be careful with LTDs Ananay Batra (Listnr), on the B2B SaaS Podcast
8. Most pieces on this question are payment vendors selling you a billing model, so they always land on subscriptions. This is a... Indie Hackers Essay · Starting Up Subscriptions vs. One-Time Payments: A Developer's Honest Take Smoteria
9. Video · Starting Up Subscription Models vs One Time Purchase: Bridge the Debate Soren Kaplan
10. Most pricing advice stays abstract, so here is a real writeup of an experiment with the numbers left in. They raised the... Conversion.com Essay · Starting Up Using experimentation to find a product's optimal price (and increase RPV by 16% in the process) Stephen Pavlovich
11. This is the exact question you are asking, answered by someone who has sold a lot of enterprise software. Lemkin gives you a... SaaStr Article · Starting Up Dear SaaStr: Our Biggest Customers Are All Asking for Custom Features. When Do We Say Yes? Jason Lemkin
12. This is the clearest single write-up on why an annual plan exists in the first place: it front-loads cash and it holds people... Paddle Article · About a 12 minute read · Starting Up Annual plans: Why every SaaS company needs to sell them Paddle
13. Video · About 12 minutes · Starting Up I looked at 105 SaaS pricing pages. Here's what I learned. Slidebean
14. If you decide usage pricing is right, this is real billing infrastructure that meters events in real time and lets you set... Metronome Tool · Product site, plus docs · Starting Up Metronome: Usage-Based Billing Platform Metronome (now part of Stripe)
15. This tackles the exact fear you named: a buyer who wants your product but cannot predict the bill, and sometimes builds it... Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Article · About 8 minute read · Starting Up Customers Want Predictability in Usage-based Pricing. Here's How to Help Them Get It. Tugce Erten and Mark Regan
16. This is the cleanest head-to-head on the exact question you are asking: it puts the two models side by side, gives real... HelloAdvisr Essay · ~10 min read · Starting Up Should I offer freemium or free trial, which drives better growth? HelloAdvisr
17. Once you have decided free is worth trying, this is the practical follow-through: a step by step way to decide what stays free,... RevenueCat Article · ~15 min read · Starting Up 6 Steps To Design A Freemium Tier That Actually Converts Daphne Tideman
18. This is the piece that made cohort-based LTV the default way serious investors think, and it is exactly the right medicine when... Social Capital / The Startup (Medium) Article · About 20 minute read · Starting Up Diligence at Social Capital, Part 3: Cohorts and (revenue) LTV Jonathan Hsu
19. Video · Short explainer (under 15 minutes) · Starting Up Customer Retention & Cohort Analysis: How VCs Calculate Customer Retention YouTube
20. This is the template to stop guessing a single LTV number and plot your actual cohorts instead. You type in only the basics... andrewchen.com Tool · Downloadable Excel template plus short guide · Starting Up The easiest spreadsheet for churn, MRR, and cohort analysis Christoph Janz (Point Nine Capital), guest post on Andrew Chen's blog
21. This is the essay that separates the two payback numbers that actually matter to you: the accounting payback (when the revenue... Point Nine (Point Nine Land) Essay · About a 15 minute read · Starting Up The Art and Science of Figuring out Your CAC Payback Time Christoph Janz
22. A free, driver-based Google Sheets model where you plug in your own assumptions and actuals and watch the numbers flow through... Drivetrain Tool · Free Google Sheets template, roughly 30 to 60 minutes to populate · Starting Up SaaS Financial Model Template in Google Sheets Drivetrain
23. This piece nails the exact trap in your question: you can have great unit economics, a customer worth 5 times what it cost to... RoadmapOne Article · About a 10 minute read · Starting Up CAC Payback Period: The Cash Flow Metric That Gates Your Growth Speed Mark Holt
24. Video · Short explainer, under 10 minutes · Starting Up What Shopify Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Is & How to Calculate It Shopify

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