Day 491: pricing

sales

so the thing about browserflow cloud is that it costs money to run it

not a lot because there’s like no one using it rn, but the fact that it’s running on a cloud service means that i can’t just open it up willy-nilly and let people run whatever they want because that’s basically putting my credit card info on the internet

for that reason, i’ve kept cloud in super secret hyper private beta by only giving access to david bieber (who’s been like the ultimate champion for browserflow and i will forever be grateful to him for his support — love you dude), but bf cloud is where it’s at so i want to start by introducing limits so i can onboard people without getting myself into inadvertent findom

whenever i think about pricing, i inevitably get stuck at “but how much do i charge and for what” and then i don’t go anywhere so instead of trying to get it right on the first try, i’m going to just start with something and iterate my way to a hopefully decent place.

going to start with four plans:

  • free

    • 1,000 credits per month

      • maybe 1000 credits total if supporting free users ends up costing too much? trial vs. freemium

    • $0/month

  • starter

    • 10,000 credits per month
    • $29/month

  • professional

    • 50,000 credits per month
    • $99/month
    • features unlocked: residential proxies, captcha solving

  • business

    • 150,000 credits per month
    • $249/month

you might be thinking, what are these credits and why is it so confusing?

1 credit = 1 second of execution time

  • 1,000 credits = ~16 minutes
  • 10,000 credits = ~2.8 hours
  • 50,000 credits = ~14 hours
  • 150,000 credits = ~41.7 hours

originally, i wanted to describe the plans directly using time (e.g. 30 minutes / month) rather than using credits because that feels way more natural, but unfortunately, not all ways of running a flow are equal.

for example, running a flow via residential proxies costs extra because that requires using a proxy service which costs money on top of the normal cloud provider charges. in that scenario for example, 1 second of execution time using a proxy would cost 10 credits (i’m coming up with these numbers randomly — i just want a somewhat reasonable starting place and i’ll fix them later).

there are also other things like automatic captcha solving which will cost something like 100 credits per use.

in general, i’m erring on the side of charging too little for things rather than charging too much because i want to be able to raise prices in the future

estimates for building pricing stuff:

  • 1 day for building limits and restrictions
  • 2 days for stripe integration and pricing page

this seems wildly optimistic lol

also i had planned on not coding much this week but giving people a way to pay me seems pretty important and i’ve been putting it off forever

i guess one more week of coding?

boy i am really bad at not-coding