Picking Pricing

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes joined by the cofounders of thirty seven signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen. This week, we're gonna talk a little bit about pricing and some different pricing models and how you can pick your pricing for our products. We're working on some new things here at the company, and with that comes deciding how that price is going to look. So let's just maybe start with some of the different pricing models that we've used in the past. I know we have different pricing, obviously, for Basecamp. And, hey, what are some of the things you guys are thinking about when you're picking a price for a new product? Well, I think we can go back to historical pricing. We started out as a web design firm, so we were doing price per project. So we never really did an hourly rate, but some people can do that. We did, you know, just here's the project. It's $50,000 That's it. That kind of thing. We so we did that. We also exported this idea called 37 express, which was a one page redesign for $3,500, and it took one week. Oh, interesting. So what we realized was that, you know, companies basically, there's three things. They want they wanna know what they're gonna get, they wanna know how long it's gonna take, and they wanna know what it's gonna cost. Everybody wants to know those three things. Yet consulting pricing is none of those things, basically. It just kinda goes on forever. You don't really know what the deliverables are gonna be, and you don't know what it's gonna really cost in the end. Kinda, sort of know, but maybe not really. So we tried to do this thing where you you buy one page at a time, and that worked pretty well for us. We didn't, like, make a fortune on it, but it was an interesting novel approach. And we tried that for a while, and that worked out pretty well. So we did that. Then we got into, SaaS stuff, which is early days. I think we did this product originally called single file, how David and I met. And that was, 12 a month or something. It was just some flat monthly fee. So we started doing that early on. Okay. Wait. Let's pause right there. What do you say was $12 a month if that was a did you just pull that number out of the air? Were you, like, looking at your expenses to determine what that price would be? I mean, I'm pulling out of the air now too because I don't remember exactly, but I think it was $12. I think it was 12. I don't know if David remembers, but maybe there's even three tiers. I don't remember. You know, you don't really know because we didn't know …