Day 15: Pricing strategy - how we decided what to charge

Day 15 of 30. Halfway there. Today we tackle the money question.

Let’s be honest: as developers, talking about pricing feels a bit weird. There’s something uncomfortable about putting a price tag on something you’ve built. But we can’t run servers on good vibes alone.

So let’s talk about how we figured out what to charge.

Looking around

We did our homework. We looked at what other screenshot APIs charge, studied their tier structures, and tried to understand the patterns. Most services offer a small free tier, then jump to paid plans that scale with usage.

Nothing groundbreaking there, but it helped us understand what customers expect.

Our pricing philosophy

Before picking numbers, we decided on some principles:

Keep it simple. Three plans. No confusing feature matrices. No “contact sales for pricing” on basic tiers.

Let people try it first. A free tier that’s generous enough to properly test, but not enough to run a production app forever.

No surprises. You should know what you’re paying before you pay it.

Stay flexible. Monthly billing only for now. We’re new here - we haven’t earned annual commitments yet.

Interactive pricing calculator

Explore the pricing tiers and calculate costs:

What we landed on

Free - $0/month

• 100 screenshots/month
• All device types
• Standard processing
• Community support

Perfect for: Testing, hobby projects, seeing if we’re any good

Pro - $45/month

• 10,000 screenshots/month
• Priority processing queue
• Email support
• 30-day screenshot retention

Perfect for: Side projects, small apps, early-stage startups

Scale - $99/month

• 100,000 screenshots/month
• Fastest processing
• Priority email support
• 90-day screenshot retention

Perfect for: Growing apps, agencies, established products

Custom - Contact us

• 500K+ screenshots
• Dedicated support
• Custom retention
• SLA available

Perfect for: When the Scale plan feels too small

Why these numbers?

$29 for Pro hits that sweet spot - serious enough to signal quality, affordable enough that most developers can expense it without a three-week approval process.

$99 for Scale is the “okay, we’re actually using this a lot” tier. Still self-serve, but built for real volume.

10K and 100K limits are easy to reason about. No mental math required.

What happens if you go over?

For paid plans, we use a soft cap. If you hit your limit, we don’t immediately cut you off and break your production app. You’ll get charged a small overage fee for extra screenshots.

The Free plan has a hard cap though - once you hit 100 you’ll need to upgrade or wait until next month.

The pub test

In Australia, there’s something called the Pub Test:

The “pub test” is a common-sense check on whether a policy, idea, or pricing seems fair, reasonable, and understandable to the average person. If something doesn’t “pass the pub test,” it means ordinary people would likely find it illogical or unfair.

We hope our pricing model passes the Pub Test.

Will this change?

Probably! Pricing is never truly “done.” We’ll learn from real usage, listen to feedback, and adjust. The goal right now is to start somewhere reasonable and improve from there.

Tomorrow: making the buttons work

Day 16 is all about Stripe integration. Time to make those “Subscribe” buttons actually do something.

Book of the day

Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujam & Georg Tacke

This one shifted how we think about pricing. The main idea: don’t bolt pricing on at the end, but instead design it alongside your product.

The authors argue that most companies undercharge out of fear. But charging too little attracts the wrong customers and undervalues your work.

Key takeaway: segment by how much value people get, not by artificial feature gates. That’s why our tiers are based on volume: the more you use it, the more value you’re probably getting.

It’s a little bit of a dense read, but absolutely worth it if you’re building something you plan to sell.