How to price an app when you’re a two-person team

Start from your costs, not your competitors. Figure out what one user actually costs you to serve, give away a small free taste so people can feel the value, then charge for the part that costs real money. For a two-person team, that math beats any clever pricing trick. Here's the longer version.

Freemium vs paid-upfront: pick the one that fits your costs

The usual app subscription pricing strategy debate is freemium vs paid. Charge everyone a few dollars at the door, or let them in free and convert a slice later. We're firmly in the free-to-start camp, and not for idealistic reasons. Nobody pays upfront for an app they haven't felt working. A saved-content app like Trott only proves itself after you've thrown a few reels at it and watched them come back searchable. Charge at the door and you kill that moment before it happens.

But free-to-start has a trap. Every free user still costs you something. If serving them is nearly free, freemium is easy. If each action does real work, "free forever for everyone" is a slow way to go broke.

How to price a mobile app when each use costs money

Most pricing advice assumes near-zero marginal cost. One more user is basically free, so you optimize for growth and worry about money later. That advice does not survive contact with our product. Trott reads every video you save end to end. That heavy processing each save needs costs real money, every single time, whether or not that user ever pays.

So the question stopped being "subscription vs one-time purchase" in the abstract. A one-time purchase for a content app is a quiet promise to do unlimited future work for a single payment. Sell that and your best users — the ones saving hundreds of things — become your most expensive ones. The classic indie app monetization mistake is selling a forever-license against an ongoing cost.

Why we landed on credits

We tried to force a clean answer between subscriptions vs one-time and neither fit. So we did the honest thing and tied pricing to the thing that actually costs us money: processing.

• You get some free. Enough to save a handful of things and have the "oh, it actually found it" moment.
• Then you top up. Buy more credits, or subscribe for a monthly refill if you save a lot.
• Cost tracks value. The more work you ask for, the more it costs — for you and for us, in the same direction.

Credits aren't trendy. They make people do tiny sums in their head, and that's friction. But they were the only model where we don't lose money on our heaviest fans, and where someone who saves two things a month never has to think about a subscription at all. Honesty about unit economics won over elegance.

Designing the free tier without giving away the farm

The free tier is the demo. Its only job is to get you to the moment where the thing clicks. Too stingy and nobody reaches it. Too generous and the people who'd happily pay never need to. We aimed the free amount at a real first session, not a permanent free lunch — enough to save some reels, search them, and feel it work. The premium tier isn't a different app behind a wall. It's the same app, more of it.

Monthly vs annual, and the $X.99 question

Offer both monthly and annual. Monthly lowers the risk of trying. Annual rewards the people already sold, and it smooths out the lumpy cash a tiny team lives on. Lead with monthly so the first number is small, then make annual the obvious deal.

On the $X.99 vs $X.00 debate: it matters less than the internet insists. The .99 trick still nudges perception a little, so we don't fight it, but we don't pretend a cent is a strategy. Price anchoring does more real work. Put the annual plan next to the monthly one and the monthly cost suddenly reads as the expensive choice — same numbers, different frame. Show the bigger credit pack beside the small one and the small one stops looking like the default. People judge prices against what's next to them, so choose the neighbors on purpose.

Regional pricing and the mistakes we'd warn you off

Use store-level regional pricing. The App Store and Google Play will localize tiers for you, and a price that's fair in one country is absurd in another. A flat global number quietly locks out whole markets. Let the stores adjust it.

The first-pricing mistakes we see indie devs make, us included:

• Pricing off competitors instead of costs. Their bill isn't your bill. Copy their number and you might be copying a loss.
• Treating "it works" as "it works profitably." Those are two different milestones, and the gap is where small teams quietly bleed.
• Being scared to charge. A free app with no plan to make money isn't generous, it's temporary.
• Overthinking the cents before the model. Get the structure right first; tune the .99 last.

None of this is final. Pricing is something you ship, watch, and adjust, not something you solve once. We're two people still tuning it in public — we wrote up what we learned getting the price wrong and the day we scrapped the plan entirely. If you've got an opinion on the credits model, we genuinely want to hear it.