Thomas Plat

Pricing is one of the topics that are definitely hard to get right. In order to offer a fair and sustainable pricing model, you first have to understand your own product.

I spent the last couple of days rethinking the pricing model for Jetpacked and ended up switching from subscription-based pricing to per-project pricing. Here is what I learned.

There is no need to obsess over subscriptions

Subscriptions are amazing. I love binging Netflix, but not every product naturally fits into a subscription model.

For Jetpacked, the problem was that projects are not equal.

One user might have:

- A production SaaS serving real customers

- A tiny staging app

- Three experiments they haven't touched in months

Trying to fit all of that into "Starter", "Pro", and "Premium" plans felt artificial.

Users think in projects, not accounts

If one project suddenly gets traffic, why should the user have to upgrade their entire account?

What they actually want is: "This project needs more power." and not "I guess I need the Pro plan now."

Pricing should follow value

The more I thought about it, the more it became obvious that the project itself is the unit of value.

A project can be:

- Free

- Small

- Production-ready

- High traffic

Each project can grow independently.

Sometimes the best product decisions come from realizing you've been forcing a familiar business model onto a product where it simply doesn't belong.

Read more on our blog: jetpacked.ai/guides/project-based-pricing-is-no…