We have pricing data on 466 indie products, and the distribution says something uncomfortable: 81% are free or freemium, and only 11.6% charge upfront.

Some of that is deliberate. A lot of it is not. This guide is about making it deliberate.

Free Is a Decision, Not a Default

Most indie products end up free or freemium not because the founder ran the numbers, but because charging felt presumptuous while the product was still rough.

That instinct is understandable and expensive. A free tier is not free to you — it costs infrastructure, support time, and the ongoing psychological weight of users who will never pay and whose feature requests you will still read.

The question is not "is my product good enough to charge for?" It is "who is this free tier for, and what does it get me?" Valid answers exist: it feeds a genuine network effect, it is your acquisition channel for a clear paid upgrade, or the product is a portfolio piece and revenue was never the point.

"It felt rude to ask" is not one of them.

Pick the Model That Matches Your Product

Freemium works when the free tier has a natural ceiling

Freemium requires a limit users predictably hit as they get more value — projects, seats, storage, API calls. The free tier should be genuinely useful and genuinely limited.

It fails when the free tier is good enough forever. If your most engaged users never hit the wall, you have built a free product with a paid tier nobody needs.

Test: can you name the exact moment a happy user is forced to upgrade? If not, freemium is the wrong model.

Free trial works when value is immediate

Trials suit products where someone can experience the core benefit within days. Fourteen days is standard; seven is often enough and creates useful urgency.

Whether to require a card is a real trade: requiring one produces far fewer, far more qualified trials. For a solo maker with limited support capacity, fewer and more serious is usually better.

Trials fail when the product takes weeks to show value — the trial expires before the user understands what they had.

Paid upfront works more often than people think

Only 11.6% of products here charge at the door, and that number is probably too low.

Charging immediately gives you the fastest possible answer to the only question that matters: will anyone pay? Ten paying customers teaches you more than a thousand free signups, and you learn it in a fraction of the time.

It works best for tools solving an expensive, specific, urgent problem for businesses — where "free" actively signals the product is not serious.

Lifetime deals are a financing decision

Five products here use them. An LTD trades all future revenue from a customer for cash today, plus a permanent support obligation.

Occasionally right when you need cash immediately and know your ongoing costs per user are near zero. Usually wrong, because the customers who buy LTDs are disproportionately the ones who will need the most support and never pay again.

How to Actually Set the Number

Start higher than feels comfortable. Nearly every indie maker underprices at launch. Raising prices later is straightforward — you grandfather existing customers and everyone understands. Discovering you built a business that cannot sustain itself at $5/month is much harder to unwind.

Price against the alternative, not your costs. Your hosting bill is irrelevant to the buyer. What matters is what they currently do instead — a $200/month competitor, a contractor, or four hours a week of manual work. Price relative to that.

Three tiers, not seven. More options produce more hesitation. A cheap tier, a main tier you actually want people on, and a higher tier for larger customers. Most revenue comes from the middle.

Charge per whatever grows with their value. Seats, projects, volume — something that increases as the customer succeeds, so your revenue grows with their usage rather than requiring a renegotiation.

Do not end everything in 9. $29 and $30 convert almost identically in B2B, and round numbers read as more confident.

The Mistakes That Show Up Repeatedly

Pricing for the customer you are, not the one you have. Indie makers price as if selling to other indie makers with no budget. If your actual customer is a business, they are comparing you to a salary, not to a Netflix subscription.

Free tiers with no ceiling. Covered above, and the single most common way freemium fails.

Waiting for the product to be "ready." It will never feel ready. Charge while it is small and improve it with the revenue.

Apologising in your pricing copy. "Only $9!" and "just $19" undercut you. State the price plainly.

Never revisiting it. Pricing set at launch, when you understood your users least, is unlikely to still be right a year later. Revisit every six months.

Changing Prices Without Losing Customers

Raising prices is less dangerous than most founders assume, provided you handle it plainly.

Grandfather existing customers at their current rate — permanently, and say so. It costs you little, it prevents churn, and it makes early users feel rewarded for the risk they took on you.

Announce changes at least 30 days ahead, explain what improved, and do not over-explain or apologise. Most customers accept it. The ones who leave over a modest increase were usually the highest-support, lowest-value segment.

The Short Version

• Choose your model deliberately, not by default.

• Freemium needs a ceiling users predictably hit.

• Charging early answers the only question that matters.

• Price against the alternative, not your costs.

• Start higher than is comfortable. Three tiers. Round numbers.

• Grandfather existing customers when you raise prices.

The 81% figure is not automatically wrong. But if you are in it because charging felt awkward rather than because free serves a purpose you can articulate, that is worth an hour of thought this week.

You can browse how other indie products price themselves by category, or see the full breakdown in our 2026 indie stack report.