Pricing advice for small software is either enterprise value-pricing theory or "charge more" as a slogan. The solo founder's question is a different one: not what this is worth, but whether there is any price at which one person can carry the customers that price requires. At $3,000 a month that question has a floor, and it sits higher than most people set their first price.
Three verdicts, and what each is worth
The analysis returns one of three things about a price, and each maps to a fixed number on the scorecard:
too_low — Cannot charge enough to be worth one person's time25acceptable — Can charge enough, with nothing spare60strong — The value is worth real money to this buyer85Scores read from the same function the scorecard uses, so a change to what a verdict is worth moves this chart. Note there is no verdict for "too high" — that is not the failure mode a solo product has.
The middle one is the one to sit with. Acceptable means you can charge enough and have nothing spare — no room for a bad month, a refund run, or the customer who turns out to cost four times the average. Most first prices land there and get read as a pass.
The floor, and where it comes from
The contract defines a low-ticket trap: an idea structurally stuck below roughly $19 a month, or $100 once. When that is true the analysis says so and names the reason, rather than proposing a price it does not believe in.
Be clear about what that threshold is. It is a judgement written into a prompt, not a measurement — a line drawn by a person who had seen enough one-person products to have an opinion. On its own it would be worth very little, and you should treat any pricing floor you read anywhere the same way.
What makes it interesting is what happens when you put it next to arithmetic that knows nothing about it.
| Price | Customers for $3,000 | Support / week | Band | Trap line |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $9 | 334 | 19.2 h | heavy | at or below |
| $19 | 158 | 9.1 h | heavy | at or below |
| $29 | 104 | 6 h | moderate | clear |
| $49 | 62 | 3.6 h | moderate | clear |
| $99 | 31 | 1.8 h | light | clear |
Customer counts and support hours from the two free calculators, at 15 support-minutes per customer per month. The bands are calibrated to a solo founder's week; the trap column is the prompt's threshold. Read the last two columns together.
The two rows at or below the pricing threshold are exactly the two rows in the heavy support band. Past eight hours a week support is not a cost of the business, it is the job — and that is where the pricing line falls, without either half having been told about the other.
Now the honest limit on that, because it is the kind of coincidence people quote badly: both halves are ours. A prompt rule agreeing with a calculator we also wrote is internal consistency, not external validation. What makes it worth publishing is only that the two were authored separately for different purposes, and neither was tuned to the other.
What the price is anchored to, and why it is a closed list
Before a number, the analysis has to name what the price is tied to. The set is closed on purpose:
revenuetime_savingscost_savingsstatusother
The first three are the ones you can defend in a sentence to a stranger — this makes you money, saves you hours, or cuts a bill. If the honest answer is the fourth, you are selling a feeling, which sometimes works and never works predictably for one person with no brand. And if the answer is the fifth, the price is a guess wearing a rationale.
Two rules that keep the number honest
Comparators cite a source or say UNKNOWN. A competitor's price is a fact about the world, and the contract forbids inventing one — every comparator carries a real URL or the tier is marked unverified. This is the single most common lie in pricing research, and it is convincing because plausible prices are easy to generate.
The model is not allowed to do the arithmetic. The customers-needed calculation is explicitly forbidden to the model and done in code instead. That is not a performance decision. A division is the one part of this that has a right answer, and handing a right answer to something that samples is how you get a page of confident numbers that do not add up.
How to set the first price
Start above the floor, not at it. Your first price is a hypothesis, and the cheapest one to test is the one that leaves you room. Dropping a price later is easy; raising it on existing customers is the conversation nobody enjoys.
Price the outcome, not the artefact. What the buyer gets back is the anchor. The number of features is not.
Then run the two numbers. Take your price to the customers-needed calculator, take the answer to the support-hours one, and look at the week that comes back. If it does not fit, the price is wrong before the product is.
The short version
- Three verdicts, and none of them is "too high". A solo product does not usually fail by charging too much.
- "Acceptable" means enough with nothing spare. Read it as a warning, not a pass.
- The stated floor is about $19 a month or $100 once — a prompt's judgement, and it lands exactly on the two rows where support alone eats a solo week.
- Both halves of that agreement are ours. Internal consistency, published as such.
- A comparator without a source is marked unverified, and the division is done in code, because it is the one part with a right answer.