It seems that there are only two ways you can go about defining a pricing model for your web app these days.

Either you blatantly copy your competitors (or 37Signals if you don’t have any direct competition), or you juggle through different permutations until you get to something that “feels right.”

While thinking through a pricing model for BrainTrust, after numerous failed attempts, I decided to write out some principles first.

1. There should be a **free plan** to give the casual user a taste of what we are about. Anything given for free should only give a taste, at a clearly limited scale. Not all features should be given out in the free version.

2. There should be a **”recommended” plan**. This plan should cost what we need the majority of our user base to be paying. It should also have the appropriate features to give the BEST OVERALL EXPERIENCE our product has to offer.

3. There should be a **”cheap” plan** for the skeptics, that includes all of the essential features but at a limited scale.

Remember, we’re only giving a few limited features in the free plan, skeptics can upgrade to the chapo plan to get a feel for all the features.

However, the cheapo plan still doesn’t provide the “best experience” — thereby giving the customer an incentive to upgrade to the recommended plan once their concerns have been alleviated.

4. Finally, there should be a **”hail mary” plan**. This is the fully equipped, no expenses spared version of your product at a triple digit price, to test out the upper limits of our market and our overall pricing assumptions.

5. Our customers should be able to take any of the paid experiences for a **trial run**. The trial run should be long enough for the custimer to run through all the important use cases the product supports.

6. There can be **”filler plans”** that give our customers a healthy gradation to pricier plans — so that our customers can slow upgrade to larger scales without having to jump straight to the “hail mary” plan.

I hope this helps. I’ll be sharing how our new pricing strategy works out for BrainTrust once we go live.

In the meantime, comments, thoughts. debates are all welcome.