How we priced this, against competitors who are free

The constraint

The closest competitors to this product are free. Killer Pool Scoreboard is free on web, iOS and Android. An open-source version exists on GitHub. The one competitor with a paid tier charges roughly eighty cents a month, or about four dollars once.

You cannot out-price that. So the question is not what to charge for life tracking — the answer to that is zero, forever — but what else there is to sell.

The first answer, which was wrong

Our first pricing model charged $3.99 a month for night history and player statistics, keeping the free tier to the last three nights.

That was built on research that had not found the free competitors. All of them keep full history. Most of them keep stats. Charging for both would have made us the worst free option in a category we had mistakenly believed we were alone in.

We moved history and statistics to the free tier the same day.

The second answer

Look at who has a budget.

A player running a Tuesday night does not have a software budget and will not develop one. A bar has a promotions budget, a marketing budget, and a dead Tuesday it would like to fix. And not one product in either competitive set — not the Killer apps, not the bracket tools — is built for or sold to a venue.

So the paid tiers point at the venue:

• Venue, $11.99 a month. Your logo and colours on the display. A public page the regulars check midweek. Staff accounts so a bartender can run the night without your password. Eight tables at once.
• Pro, $3.99 a month. For the serious weekly organiser rather than the bar: season standings, saved rosters, custom rulesets, two tables, CSV export.
• Free. Everything needed to run a whole night, properly, forever. The strike engine, undo, offline, the TV display, the QR card, who has paid, and the payout maths.

Checking the maths

Fixed infrastructure is $5 a month. A paying account costs about one and a half cents a month in database writes, function calls and email.

Pro at $3.99 nets $3.57 after Stripe, which is an 89% margin. Venue at $11.99 nets $11.34, which is 94%. Annual plans are higher again because the card is charged once.

Break-even is two Pro subscribers, or one Venue.

The risk, stated plainly

If venues will not pay $11.99 a month, this does not make money — because the individual organiser has four free alternatives and no reason to switch to a paid one.

That makes the first real validation test obvious, and it is not a thousand free signups. It is one bar, paying, in a month's time.