Launch free or paid: pricing on launch day
Should you launch an AI tool free, on a trial, or paid from day one? This Launchelion guide works through the three options against inference costs, what launch traffic realistically converts, why a free tier needs stated numeric limits, and how to raise a launch price without punishing early users.
By the Launchelion team
Pricing is the launch decision makers postpone longest and regret fastest. Unlike a landing page you can rewrite, a price is a promise to the people who signed up under it, and changing it later has a social cost that a copy change does not.
AI tools have a specific complication: every free user costs you money per request. A launch that goes well with an unlimited free tier can produce a bill that arrives before the first revenue does.
The three options, honestly
There is no universally correct answer, but there is a wrong one: launching with pricing marked as coming soon. It reads as unfinished, it makes commenters ask about price all day instead of about the product, and it costs you the buyers who were ready.
- Fully free: maximum signups, zero revenue signal, and an inference bill that scales with your success. Defensible when you are buying learning, not income, and only if you have costed the worst case.
- Free tier with stated limits plus paid plans: the default for AI tools, because the limit is what converts. The limit must be a number, not a word.
- Paid only, with a trial: fewest signups, strongest signal. Every person who pays on day one tells you more than a hundred free accounts.
How much does launch traffic actually convert?
Less than you expect, and any specific percentage you are quoted without a named source and a sample size should be ignored. Launch audiences are curious rather than in-market, which is exactly why the free tier limit matters more than the headline price: most visitors will never hit it, and the ones who do are the ones worth converting.
Instrument it so you have your own number by the end of the week. Signups, activations and paid conversions, counted separately, is the minimum instrumentation.
Write the free tier as numbers
Generous free tier means nothing. Twenty documents a month, five minutes of audio a day, one project with three collaborators: those are numbers a buyer can plan around, and they are also the fields a directory or a comparison page can record about you. Vague limits get you excluded from other people's tables.
State what happens at the limit too. Whether the tool stops, queues, or degrades is a question your support inbox will otherwise answer one email at a time.
Verified revenue beats claimed revenue
If you do reach revenue, connect a payment provider so the number is verified rather than asserted. On this leaderboard, revenue connected through Stripe is shown as verified and everything else is labeled as claimed, which is the honest way to run it: an unverified figure is a marketing statement, and readers price it accordingly.
Raising the price after launch
Announce it, date it, and grandfather the people who signed up during the launch window. Early users are the ones who will recommend you, and the goodwill of a locked price costs less than the churn of a surprise increase. Publish the change on your own pricing page rather than only in an email, because that page is what people check.