Founding Curve Pricing is a subscription pricing model in which the price rises progressively as customers join, while each customer keeps the price available at the moment they subscribed for as long as their subscription stays continuously active.
The whole model fits in four sentences:
- Join earlier and pay less.
- Your price is set at the moment you subscribe.
- Keep your subscription active and you keep that price.
- As more people join, the price rises — until it reaches the standard rate and stops.
That is it. Everything below is detail, examples, and the reasoning behind it.
The problem it solves
Almost every subscription product launches the same way. The founder picks a price the mature product deserves — say €9 a month — then bolts a temporary discount onto it. 50% off for three months. Founding member deal, ends Friday.
Two things go wrong.
The discount is a fiction. Everyone knows the real price is €9 and the deadline is arbitrary. A deadline invented by the seller creates pressure, not trust.
And the discount ends for everyone at once. Customer #3, who joined when the product was three screens and a bug tracker, gets exactly the same deal as customer #900, who joined once it was polished and reviewed. The person who took the real risk gets nothing extra for it.
Founding Curve Pricing fixes both by making one change: the price is a function of how many people have already joined.
How it works
The founder picks two numbers.
- The target price — what the mature product should cost. Say €9 per month.
- The founding cohort size — how many customers the curve spans. Say 1,000.
The product does not launch at €9. It launches near zero and climbs.
| Customer number | Monthly price they lock in |
|---|---|
| #1 | €0.01 |
| #10 | €0.09 |
| #100 | €0.90 |
| #250 | €2.25 |
| #500 | €4.50 |
| #750 | €6.75 |
| #1,000 | €9.00 |
| #1,001 and onward | €9.00 |
Customer #250 pays €2.25 a month — in year one, and in year five, as long as they never cancel. Customer #750 pays €6.75. Customer #1,001 pays the full €9, the same as everyone who arrives after them.
Nobody was given a discount. Each person simply arrived at a different point in the product's history, and the price is the record of that.
Monthly
price
€9 | ●
| ●
€7 | ●
|
€5 | ●
|
€3 | ●
|
€1 | ●
| ●
€0 |●________________________________________
1 100 250 500 750 1,000
Customer number
Once the curve reaches the target price, it flattens and stays there forever.
Price
^
€9| ─────────────────────
| /
| /
| /
| /
| /
| /
€0|______/
+-------------------------------------------->
Number of customers
Two examples, explained plainly
Example 1: the queue at the door
Forget software for a second.
Imagine a new restaurant that has decided a meal there will eventually cost €50. On opening night, the first person through the door pays almost nothing. The second pays a fraction more. The hundredth pays a bit more than that. By the thousandth guest the price is €50, and it stays €50 from then on.
The twist that makes it a pricing model rather than a stunt: whatever you paid on the night you first walked in is what you pay every time you come back — as long as you keep coming back. Stop coming, and next time you pay whatever the current price is.
The person who took a chance on an unknown kitchen on night one is rewarded for the rest of their life as a customer. The person who waited until the reviews came in pays for that certainty. Nobody is cheated. The price simply encodes when you decided to trust it.
Example 2: ExampleApp
Now the real case. A solo founder builds ExampleApp. They believe the mature product is worth €10 a month, and they set the founding cohort at 2,000 customers.
| Customer | Locked monthly price |
|---|---|
| #1 | €0.01 |
| #100 | €0.50 |
| #250 | €1.25 |
| #500 | €2.50 |
| #1,000 | €5.00 |
| #1,500 | €7.50 |
| #2,000 | €10.00 |
Maria finds ExampleApp early through a forum post. She is customer #378. The site tells her:
Join today for €1.89/month. Keep this price for as long as your subscription stays active. 377 founding customers have joined before you.
She signs up. Her price is €1.89.
Three years later ExampleApp has integrations, a mobile app, a support team, and 40,000 customers paying €10. Maria still pays €1.89, because she never cancelled. That €1.89 is not a coupon anyone gave her — it is the fossil record of the week she showed up.
Tom hears about it from Maria a year later. By then the price reads €6.40. He pays €6.40 for as long as he stays, which is still a permanent advantage over the €10 everyone pays after customer #2,000.
Maria's sister joins at €1.90, cancels after four months to save money, and comes back a year later. She now pays €7.10. The founding rate belonged to the subscription, not to the person.
The math
For the simplest version — a straight line:
Price = P × n / N
P = the final, target monthly price
N = the number of founding customers
n = this customer's position in line
For a €9 product with 1,000 founding customers:
Price = €9 × customer number / 1,000
The step between one customer and the next is:
Increment = Final price ÷ Number of founding customers
= €9 ÷ 1,000
= €0.009
So each new subscriber pushes the price up by about nine tenths of a cent, rounded to the nearest cent when displayed. If your billing system finds per-customer increments awkward, move the price every 5 or 10 customers instead. The principle survives the rounding.
What the customer actually sees
The mechanism only works if it is visible. The price should be presented as a live number, not a static one.
FOUNDING PRICE
€3.79 / month
Customer #421 secured this rate.
Next founding price:
€3.80 / month
Refresh the page next week and it reads slightly higher. The price becomes a public counter of the product's own growth — and a customer's rate becomes a small piece of biography. I joined when it was €1.64.
A product can lean into that: Founding customer #183, or Member since €1.64.
The customer's journey looks like this:
DISCOVER PRODUCT
|
v
CURRENT PRICE: €2.84
|
v
JOIN
|
v
LOCK €2.84 RATE
|
v
KEEP SUBSCRIPTION ACTIVE
|
v
PAY €2.84 WHILE OTHERS
JOIN AT HIGHER PRICES
And if they leave:
€2.84 FOUNDING PRICE
|
v
CANCEL
|
v
FOUNDING PRICE ENDS
|
v
RETURN SIX MONTHS LATER
|
v
CURRENT PRICE: €7.30
Why it works
1. Early customers are compensated for real risk. The first users get fewer features, more bugs, thinner documentation, no community, and no guarantee the company survives the year. Traditionally they are thanked with a badge. Here they are paid, permanently, in the only currency that compounds: a lower bill.
2. Waiting has a visible cost. A normal pricing page gives a visitor no reason to subscribe today rather than next month. Here the cost of hesitating is printed on the page. The question stops being should I buy this? and becomes do I want today's price, or next month's?
3. The urgency is real, not manufactured. "Sale ends tonight" is a deadline the seller invented and can move. "The price rises when the next person joins" is a fact about the world. The mechanism is fully transparent, which means it can be trusted — and a customer can verify it simply by watching.
4. The price grows with the product. A three-month-old product genuinely delivers less than the same product will at three years. Charging €1 then and €9 later is not a trick; it is accuracy. The commercial model matures at the same rate as the software.
5. It gives customers a history worth telling. "I was here early, so I pay less" is a sentence people say out loud. It turns a billing detail into a story a customer has a reason to share — which happens to be the cheapest distribution a young product can get.
Variations on the curve
The line does not have to be straight.
Linear. A constant rate of increase. Easiest to explain, easiest to defend.
Price
^
| /
| /
| /
| /
| /
|__/
+------------>
Customers
Slow-start. The earliest arrivals get an unusually large advantage; the price accelerates later. Useful when you need a community quickly and are willing to pay for it.
Price
^
| /
| /
| /
| __/
| __/
|__/
+------------>
Customers
Fast-start. The price climbs quickly at first, then approaches the target slowly. Protects revenue while still rewarding early participation.
Price
^
| ______
| /
| /
| /
|_/
|
+------------>
Customers
Milestone version. If per-customer pricing is operationally painful, move in bands instead.
| Customers | Price |
|---|---|
| 1–100 | €1 |
| 101–200 | €2 |
| 201–300 | €3 |
| 401–500 | €5 |
| 701–800 | €8 |
| 801+ | €9 |
This is easier to run and loses some of the elegance. The strongest version of the model uses the exact customer position, because that is what turns the price into a timestamp rather than a tier.
The rules that keep it honest
Cancellation ends the founding rate. The rate belongs to a continuous subscription, not to an email address. Sarah joins at €2.17. Three years later the standard price is €9 and Sarah still pays €2.17. If she cancels and returns, she pays whatever the curve reads that day. This keeps the model economically survivable, and it is what gives the founding rate its ongoing value — it is something you can lose.
Lock the plan, not the universe. Define precisely what the founding price covers:
Your €2.17 Founding Plan stays €2.17 for as long as you remain continuously subscribed.
Things that can legitimately be priced separately later: extra AI usage, storage, additional team seats, premium modules, new product tiers, optional add-ons. This preserves the promise without freezing the business in amber.
Set a floor if your costs demand one. Nothing requires starting at €0.01. If every account costs real money to serve — inference, storage, bandwidth — start the curve at €1, or €3, and run it to €9 from there. The model is about position determining price, not about starting at zero.
The honest cost to the founder
This is a real commitment, not a marketing gesture. Some customers will still be paying €1.89 a decade from now, and you will have promised them that in public.
You are making a trade:
- You give up meaningful lifetime revenue from your first cohort.
- You get adoption at the moment adoption is hardest to buy, plus a group of customers with a standing reason to stay and to talk about you.
Before committing, know your marginal cost per account. If serving a customer costs €2 a month, a €0.01 founding rate is not generosity, it is a slow leak. In that case use a floor, meter the expensive parts separately, or shorten the cohort.
On the €0 question
The first customer could pay nothing at all. It makes a good story: customer #1 pays €0 forever.
There is also a case for charging something. Even €0.10 establishes a commercial relationship, puts a real payment method on file, and proves the checkout works. A practical curve might start at €0.10 or €0.50 — and you can still hand customer #1 a ceremonial free account on top.
What makes this distinct
Several neighbouring practices already exist, and Founding Curve Pricing is none of them on its own:
- Companies offer founding discounts — but those are flat and time-boxed.
- Companies grandfather existing customers onto old prices — but only when they happen to raise prices, as a defensive move.
- Companies raise prices at milestones — but in jumps, announced after the fact.
This model combines them into one specific mechanism:
Customer position determines price. Every subscriber can hold a slightly different rate. The progression is defined in advance and published. The price climbs to a stated target and then stops. Each rate stays attached to that customer's continuous subscription.
The result is a direct, legible relationship between how early you joined and what you pay.
Why publish this
Pricing is normally treated as a fixed property of a product — a number you choose once and then defend. Founding Curve Pricing treats price as something that develops alongside adoption.
It gives a founder a structured way to start cheap, reward the people who took the early risk, and arrive gradually at the price a mature product deserves — without a single day where everyone's discount expires at once.
And it gives every early customer something they can understand in one sentence:
I was here early, so I pay less.
Origin note
Concept: Founding Curve Pricing Author: Feraz Zeid Version: 1.0 Published: 24 August 2026 Canonical URL: https://ferazzeid.com/blog/founding-curve-pricing/
This document establishes a public definition and provenance for the pricing model named Founding Curve Pricing.
The core formulation:
- Define a target subscription price.
- Define a founding customer range.
- Begin below the target price.
- Increase the price progressively as additional customers subscribe.
- Lock each customer's rate at the price available when they joined.
- Preserve that rate while the subscription remains continuously active.
- Reset the customer to the current rate after cancellation and later resubscription.
- Stop increasing the price once the target price is reached.
The model is published openly. Anyone is free to use it, build on it, or implement it in their own products. Attribution to Feraz Zeid and a link to this page is appreciated, and helps keep the definition of the term stable.
