Usage First, Monetization Later

Adoption beats pricing - until it doesn’t.

For bottom-up, PLG products, your job early on is to earn trust inside the workflow. Start with usage, not paywalls.

Ship a workflow-native wedge that meets users where they already are.

For Socket, that was a GitHub app catching typosquatting installed in a few clicks, instantly useful.

Instead of forcing logins and credit cards, they built something people would actually use.

Clean up gating later. Compounding usage gives you leverage.

When you monetize, make pricing plans forcing functions, not feature dumps. Let limits do the work.

Socket initially tied pricing to public (free) vs. private repos (paid).

That failed.

Plenty of real businesses are fully open source - they left a lot of money on the table.

The better forcing functions showed up later when they found better signals for when a mature company got real value out of the product, e.g. “Send a Jira ticket when an issue is found.” or “Fire a webhook so an automation can run.”

Setting different pricing tiers sounds easy.

Most get it wrong. As in practice, only very few limits actually move people up a pricing tier.

Find those. Strip the rest.

To get there, design for personas you can name in plain English.

“Individual → Team → Business” shouldn’t just be marketing language; it’s a commitment to who each plan serves and how they grow.

E.g., if a feature enables team collaboration (integrations, automations, approvals), it belongs above the individual tier. If it helps the product explain itself, keep it free.

When you eventually move into enterprise, find your price by pushing it until you get pushback.

Socket for example increased their price by 20% for the first 10+ new larger customer - until pushback came and they had found their price.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Then check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Feross Aboukhadijeh, the CEO and Co-Founder of Socket ($65M raised from a16z, Abstract, Dylan Field, Aaron Levie, and others).

Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify

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