Chapters · 3 min read
Priced below cost, on purpose
We charge less than we could, sometimes less than a thing costs us to run, because the cheapest fair option in a category is the one people stay with and tell a friend about.
Most companies price for the most they can extract before you walk. We price for the opposite: the least we can charge and still be here in ten years. Where it makes sense we charge less than a feature costs us to run, on purpose, so the free tier stays genuinely useful and the paid price never feels like a stretch. That reads like charity and isn't. It's a bet that the cheapest fair option in a category is the one people stay with, and mention to a friend, and that a name for not gouging people outlasts any margin we skip to earn it. The mechanics of where the money comes from are in how we make money; this is the promise underneath them.
Low prices that stay low
The commitment isn't just low prices today. It's low prices that stay low. The oldest trick in software is to hook people cheap and raise the price once they depend on you, and it's the exact thing this rules out. Our prices should go one direction over time, and it's down, as we get more efficient at running the thing. If a price ever rises, it's because you're getting materially more, and you'll see it coming from a long way off.
No bill shock, no billing tricks
There's a whole industry of billing tricks, and we use none of them.
- No surprise charge at the end of the month for something you didn't know was metered.
- No pricing that quietly punishes you for growing.
- No free trial that flips into a charge you never noticed agreeing to.
- No "call sales for the price," and no maze to cancel.
If you ever pay us more, you'll see it coming, and it'll be because you're getting more, not because we hid a meter somewhere clever.
When we can't tell what's fair
If we genuinely can't work out whether a price is fair, we round in your favor. A few dollars isn't worth a customer's quiet sense that we nickel-and-dimed them, and it definitely isn't worth the story they'd tell about it.
Leaving is always an option
Low prices only mean something if you're free to leave, so you are. Flagon is open source and self-hostable: no lock-in, no hostage data, no contract written so that leaving hurts. If you want to go, you can, and export is a first-class feature, not a dead end we quietly never built. We're betting most people won't leave, not because they can't, but because staying is the better deal. A company that only keeps customers by making the exit painful has stopped competing on the thing that matters.
Why fair pricing wins
The worry with all of this is obvious: aren't we leaving money on the table? A little, in the short run, and it's the best trade we make. Price gouging buys you one good quarter and a reputation you spend years apologizing for. Being the option people trust on price compounds the other way: they stay longer, they bring others, and they give us the benefit of the doubt when we get something wrong.
This is the same logic as making users happy and the long view in our values. The cheapest fair price isn't the generous choice. Over a long enough time, it's the winning one. You can see exactly what this looks like on the pricing page.