One note I have about your pricing page is that you don't explain what a startup or small to midsize team actually is. I would also much rather have a set pricing scheme immediately with a 60-90 day trial period similar to how slack works.
Hi, Fred here – I’m one of the founding team members. Thanks for the comment.
First, to the question about team sizes. We view "Startups" as generally teams with <25 users, followed by small/mid-sized "Growth" companies that have <250 employees. Beyond that, we anticipate most companies falling into the "Scale" category. That said, this could all be revised based on usage data and I will also update our website later today to reflect the above.
Regarding pricing, we haven’t finalized it yet because we’ve prioritized understanding how teams actually use emdash—what works, what doesn’t, and where we should focus.
Pricing is important, and we want to get it right. Typical usage patterns, evolving AI and cloud/infra costs, and where we fit competitively in the market are all variables we still need to explore. We’ll need to strike the right balance and be competitive enough with vis-a-vis the market.
It would be smart to start with a free trial before transitioning users to a paid plan. We’re still figuring out whether that should be time-based (e.g., 60-90 days), usage-based (e.g., after your 20th video meeting).
I get it – no one likes unexpected pricing shifts and when the time comes, we will be transparent about our thinking and communicate changes well in advance. Our goal is to build something sustainable, not just for us, but for the teams that rely on emdash. Hope this helps clarify.
"We haven't figured out pricing" sounds like a big turnoff for anyone seriously considering this who wants self service.
Just pick something that's a no brainier for people to try, change it later if you have to. Your biggest risk right now is people walk without giving the product real consideration. Lack of clarity on pricing will do that for a lot of people, even though you are offering a free trial.
Thanks for the advice. One challenge for us will be how to price-in token based costs, e.g. downstream GPT services. There was an interesting post earlier today on HN related to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186032 which recommended progressive pricing, which I thought was really interesting. On the other hand, the marginal cost of these services is being aggressively driven down by the big players so it may ultimately be safe to provide a fixed cost subscription model.
Have you thought about carving out the token expense? I.e. giving users the option of using their own api key vs you being the middle man for that expense?
I helped develop hackatime (https://github.com/hackclub/hackatime/) this fall for our latest project high seas, and it's been a truly amazing experience. I'm 16, and I never thought I would be maintaining and operating a program with over 17 thousand users and 25 million+ rows! It's been a wild ride that I don't think I would have gotten without hackclub :) Also just in general the community is amazingly supportive; I joined a little over a year ago and I've made a ton of really amazing friends that I hope I can keep for the rest of my life ^_^
Fascinating article! Weird side note but lovely note callout. I’ve been trying to get something similar on my site but haven't got it to work right. Is the code for your site open source? I check your GitHub and couldn’t find it.
Hi yall! I'm pretty new to writing blog posts but this was interesting to write, so hopefully it will be interesting to read ^-^
For a bit of background about this article, I wrote it in the space of 9 hours while I was at a Hilton I was staying at. I started writing after I got there around 21:00 went to bed at 23:00 and woke up at 5:30 to finish it.
