Thank you for this great article. As a solo developer, I shared the same trajectory, and realized that pricing was probably the most difficult of the non-code-related tasks for a side project. It is very natural to low-ball prices at the beginning, until the moment you realize it is easier to raise your price by 30% than to find 30% more paying customers.

I have arrived at a more radical conclusion though : drop your free tier. Free users tend to be the most demanding, I don’t know why. They overload your customer support capacity. Freemium work for VC-financed companies, but for us independent dev, it may be a sound strategy to explicity look for _less_ users, focusing on the serious ones.

Shameless plug of an article I wrote to detail my thought process : https://blog.smooz.io/drop-your-free-tier-dadb93dfc57a