How to price a micro-SaaS when you have no customers to learn from
Price a micro-SaaS with no customers by anchoring on the cost of the problem rather than on competitors: find what the buyer currently spends in time or money, price at 10–20% of that, and offer two tiers so the price has something to be compared against. Start higher than feels comfortable — first prices are almost always too low, and raising a price on existing customers is far harder than discounting for early ones. Test on five buyers; if nobody flinches, the number is too low.
The workflow
Before you name a price, write the sentence "without this, they spend X hours or Y dollars per month." A bookkeeper doing four hours of manual reconciliation at $75/hour is losing $300 a month. Everything downstream depends on this number, and pricing conversations with founders who cannot state it always collapse into copying a competitor's page.
That $300/month of manual work supports $30–$60/month comfortably and $79 with a strong argument. Below 10% and you are leaving money on the table while signalling that the problem is trivial; above 30% and the buyer starts doing the arithmetic on doing it themselves. This band is a starting point you will correct with evidence, not a law — but it beats a number picked because it looked friendly.
A single price is judged in a vacuum; two prices are judged against each other. Make the cheap tier genuinely limited by a usage number the buyer can predict — transactions, seats, sites — never by removing a feature that makes the product work. The most common micro-SaaS pricing mistake is three tiers with feature checkboxes nobody understands, which converts worse than two obvious ones.
- Input
- Starter $19 (200 transactions) / Pro $49 (unlimited) — reconciliation tool for solo bookkeepers
- What comes back
- Clean gap and a predictable limiter — this structure works. Two fixes: $19 is under 7% of the $300/mo problem, so both tiers can move up roughly 40%; and "unlimited" invites your worst-cost customer. Try $29 / $69 with Pro capped at 2,000 transactions.
Run it yourself — free, no signup:
0/ 100 — BrokenThis page is costing you money from people who already decided to buy. Rebuild it around the unchecked rows before you spend another dollar on traffic.
Fix in this order- 1.A real price is on the page
- 2.Three or fewer plans
- 3.The price scales on a value metric
Weighted by what each one costs you. Do the top item, ship, then measure — fixing all three at once tells you nothing about which worked.
Not a survey — a conversation. "It's $69 a month, does that work for you?" then silence. Watch for the flinch: an immediate yes means too cheap, a hesitation followed by a question about what is included means about right, and a flat no with no follow-up question means you have the wrong buyer or the wrong price band entirely. Five people give you the pattern.
Free beta users teach you almost nothing about willingness to pay and are hard to convert later. Instead, keep the list price and offer early customers a founding discount with an end date: "$69, but $39 locked for twelve months while it's rough." You get revenue, honest feedback, and a price you never have to walk back publicly.
Ten paying customers is enough to know whether the price is a barrier. If your close rate is above 50% and nobody mentions price, raise the list price 30% for new customers and grandfather the existing ones. Bootstrapped founders typically undercharge for a year; the raise is the highest-return four hours of work available, because every point of price flows straight to margin.
- Input
- 10 customers at $39, costs $180/mo, part-time — what does a raise to $69 do?
- What comes back
- $390 → $690 MRR on the same customer count once the founding cohort rolls off. Covers costs 3.8× instead of 2.2×, and the difference is the first month you could pay for help. Break-even churn tolerance improves from 1 to 2 lost customers per month.
Run it yourself — free, no signup:
8%Runway5+ yearsCash never reaches zero inside five years: you break even at month 12 and it climbs from there. That holds exactly as long as the growth rate does.Break-even monthMonth 12The month the borrowing stops. Worth more attention than the runway number.What cash ÷ burn would tell you12 monthsIt says 12 months, because it assumes your MRR never moves. That assumption is the entire difference between running out next year and not running out.Under six months: cut, because you need a certain effect fast. Above twelve: grow, because growth compounds and cutting caps your ceiling. The founders who get this wrong grow when they should cut — growing feels like progress.
Questions founders ask about this
- What should I charge for a micro-SaaS with no customers?
- Ten to twenty per cent of what the problem currently costs the buyer each month. If manual work costs them $300, a $29–$69 price is defensible; a $9 price signals the problem is trivial and attracts the customers who churn hardest.
- Should a micro-SaaS have a free tier?
- Usually not at the start. Free tiers need volume to work and they cost support time you do not have. A time-limited trial or a money-back guarantee gets you the same trust with a fraction of the cost.
- How many pricing tiers should a micro-SaaS have?
- Two. One price gives buyers nothing to compare; three or more usually means feature checkboxes nobody reads. Two tiers separated by a predictable usage limit convert best at small scale.
- Is it bad to raise prices on early customers?
- Raising for new customers is normal and expected. Grandfather the early cohort — the goodwill costs you little at ten customers and buys you honest testimonials while the product is still rough.
- How do I know my price is too low?
- Nobody hesitates. If every prospect says yes immediately and none asks what is included, you are under the price the market would bear — that flinch is the cheapest pricing research there is.
Next, founders usually do this
- How to validate a SaaS idea before you write a line of code6 steps
- How to calculate runway for a bootstrapped SaaS (and what to do with the number)6 steps
- How to find a micro-SaaS idea worth building (without waiting for inspiration)6 steps
- How to decide whether your product should have a free tier6 steps
The tools used above have their own pages — Pricing Page Grader and MRR & Runway Calculator — and the SOP SOP: Research and set your first price runs the same ground in more depth. Also worth reading: the Nine Lives Doctrine, and real verdicts from ideas kitty has run this workflow on.
kitty.build runs this entire workflow for you
Every step above — the research, the competitor read, the numbers, the honest verdict — is what nine specialist AI boards do automatically when you feed her an idea. She will tell you to kill it if it deserves killing. First idea is free.
Feed her an idea — freeNo card · Failed tasks are free · Your repo, your domain, your revenue