Figuring out what to charge your customers is one of the toughest challenges an early-stage company faces. It’s a mix of strategy, gut instinct, and constant iteration — especially in a new category where there are few, if any, benchmarks to follow. 

For Schematic, finding the right pricing structure was as much art as science, but it was a process grounded in our product philosophy and customer conversations.

Here’s what we learned along the way—and where we’ve landed so far.

The Challenges of Early-Stage Pricing

We’re an early stage company, and pricing at this stage can be particularly challenging for a few reasons.:

1. Low Sample Size

We’re working with a relatively small customer base, which means our data points are limited. It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions about what customers do or do not value with any significance.

2. More Art Than Science

Pricing in a nascent category lacks the clarity that established players can provide. We’re not just defining pricing — we’re also educating the market about how they should value a product like ours.

3. Lack of Comparisons

Because we’re solving for a problem that hasn’t been fully addressed before, there’s no obvious competitor to compare against. There are tangential players to proxy against, but we’re essentially writing the rules as we go.

How We Approached It

We listened to two voices: that of our customers and that of our own gut instincts about how we wanted the market to receive a solution like this.

Overall, at our stage, we simply want great customers, which meant rather than maximize for profit, we wanted to maximize for pricing that made our product a no-brainer to buy.

We conducted ~30 willingness to pay interviews, which included current customers and prospects. During those calls we used this WTP framework to understand perceived value, relative value, and, very simply, what price point folks thought was fair. Their feedback was incredibly rich, and informed 75% of where we landed.

We also asked ourselves what we believed the market needed based on the use cases we currently support and want to support in the future. That informed the last 25% of where we landed.

The Principles We Landed On

After all of that listening, reflecting, and scrap paper, we landed on four core principles to guide our pricing effort:

1. Simpler is better - The less we need to explain, the better. Complex pricing confuses customers and slows down the sales conversations.

2. Even the smallest companies should be able to afford Schematic - This means a generous free or low cost plan that folks can use until their business is on the rails.

3. Users need a push - We offer all of our features for free, but only for a period of time. Developers often juggle lots of initiatives, and deadlines help push forward evaluation.

4. We shouldn’t get paid more until our customers are getting paid more - This informed our value metric and package segmentation.

Where We Ended Up

We ended up with three tiers and a generous free plan.

The free tier is for side projects or hobbyists, allowing users to quickly integrate billing and entitlements into their application. It’s designed to help anyone get started quickly without the hassle of handling webhooks, hacking together packaging, or building plan management pages in their app.

As startups grow, they’re a fit for our team tier, which introduces more advanced features for developer ergonomics (e.g. multiple environments, a longer audit trail retention period), and features such as trials, add ons, and company overrides.

We introduce event-based metering, webhooks, and security features in our business tier. Finally, our enterprise tier is for the scaled use cases that require more support and higher performance.

What’s Next

Pricing is always a work in progress. Fortunately, we’ve built Schematic on Schematic, so we’re ready to adjust based on feedback. We’ll keep listening to customers, refining our approach, and making sure our pricing stays aligned with our core principles.