Your Free Tier Is a Line Item
Most solo founders model revenue carefully and cost casually. They know what they charge, they know roughly how many users they need, and they assume the running costs are small enough to ignore. The problem is that a one-person SaaS has two cost structures sitting on top of each other, one fixed and one per-user, and only the fixed half is visible on a pricing page. This article is about finding the invisible half: how to calculate your true marginal cost per user, why a free tier is a line item rather than a marketing channel, and which three costs scale worst as you grow.
The Two Cost Structures
Every SaaS has a fixed cost base and a per-user cost. Almost everyone underestimates the second one, because most vendor pricing hides it inside a monthly plan until you cross a threshold.
- Fixed costsare the ones you pay whether you...
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