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Comment by personjerry | Hacker News Reader

> It’s very probable that you will need to change your pricing and feature packaging.

Citation needed? In my experience it's very probable your startup goes out of business before this is ever a concern.

Building around future pricing seems like premature optimization for me.

The problem is that it's very chicken and egg. You want to build enough flexibility into the system to support the next step you are looking to take while not introducing so much complexity that you end up not doing the things that deliver value to the customer.

That said, I've been in the situation where there were 50+ "billing plans" and who knows how many custom plans in order to support some lighthouse customers... It was not a fun experience and the move to an entitlements system was painful. If you start from the idea of entitlements/feature flags/etc separate from the billing logic, you can save yourself a ton of heartache later.

That is exactly my experience, but we stopped it before it became a problem. We only had 5 plans and we didn't do too many "custom plans" until we had the system in place.

Once it was in place, we moved everyone into normal, supported situations.

Startups often underprice their products/services. They discover pricing improvements through experiments, experience and willingness-to-pay surveys. Some try advanced techniques like bundling products. All of the above benefits from flexibility.

One could argue the opposite of your assertion: startups may fail because they dont change their pricing and packages.

Here’s a citation on underpricing: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/7M-most-startups-are-und...

Yes, I know a startup where the difference between failure and becoming a multimillion dollar company was just in the pricing model alone. Their initial pricing put off most customers, then they changed it and kept the product the same and they got the usual hockey stick growth.

Before it goes out of business, you will spend some frustrating amount of time playing with pricing or giving discounts to customers when you will wish desperately that you had a simpler (more structured) way of dealing with pricing than just going into various parts of the code all the time.

Many startups will go out of business because they don't address this concern.

Startups have extremely little information to guide their pricing and packaging decisions, and often find right away that they've just picked the wrong way to monetize.

An optimal solution makes it easy to build a flexible system, so that it can change rapidly as new information becomes available.

But the point of pricing flexibility is that you want to get your MVP out as soon as possible. How are you supposed to do that if it is difficult to change your pricing in the future? If you commit yourself to a price you are going to have to price it as a finished product and then add discounts for early adopters.

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