The first time TheCRM showed up on Hacker News (in beta, anonymously), three VCs reached out within 48 hours. Two of them said the same thing: “Promising. The TAM in solo CRM is huge. What’s your pricing model?”
I told them: $29.90, one-time, lifetime updates.
Both replies came back within an hour. Same energy. Same wording: “Have you considered subscription? You’d be leaving so much money on the table.”
That’s true. And that’s the whole point.
The math is straightforward.
If I charge $29.90 once, my lifetime revenue per customer is $29.90 (minus Stripe fees, plus a refund or two).
If I charge $9 per month — which is below market for “real” CRMs but a perfectly reasonable subscription price — and the average customer stays for two years, my lifetime revenue per customer is $216.
That’s a 7× difference per customer. It looks like an obvious choice if you stare at the math long enough. Most founders I know stare at it long enough.
But the math hides what it actually buys you, on either side.
What $216 of subscription buys, on the vendor side
It buys an obligation. Every month, the customer is one click away from cancelling. So I now have to make sure they keep using TheCRM, keep finding it valuable, keep getting reminded that their card will be charged in 14 days. I have to invest in retention metrics. I have to think about churn cohorts. I have to consider whether to add a “Pro” tier so I can move existing customers up. I have to ship features that look good in marketing comparisons, even if my best customers don’t need them.
All those things take engineering time away from making TheCRM better at the things people actually bought it for.
And subtly — almost imperceptibly — my incentive shifts away from “ship the best CRM” toward “ship the CRM that maximises monthly retention.” Those are not the same product. The first one has fewer notifications, fewer in-app upsells, fewer “you haven’t logged in for 3 days” emails. The second one has more.
What $29.90 once buys, on the customer side
It buys peace. Once. Forever. No renewal email. No “your trial expires in 14 days.” No price-bracket review when your usage crosses a threshold. No 8% increase next September.
You buy the CRM, you use the CRM, you get on with your business. The product fades into the background, which is exactly what good infrastructure is supposed to do.
It also buys honesty. If TheCRM doesn’t ship updates, you stop telling people about it. If it does ship updates, you tell more people. The feedback loop between the product getting better and my business growing is one degree of separation, not three.
“But you’re leaving money on the table.”
Yes. About $186 per customer, by the calculation above.
I am also leaving on the table: – The need to constantly fight churn – The need to differentiate “Pro” from “Plus” from “Premium” tiers – The need to retain customers who don’t actually like TheCRM but haven’t bothered to cancel – The need to wake up every morning thinking about MRR – The need to ship features that drive expansion revenue rather than core utility
I’d rather leave $186 on the table than pick all that up.
What this means for you
If you buy TheCRM, you’re buying it from a one-person company with no investors, no MRR pressure, and no reason to make the app worse to extract more money from you.
If TheCRM keeps shipping good updates, more people buy it, and I keep working on it. If TheCRM stops being good, sales dry up, and I have to do something else. Same incentive system you’d want from any indie tool.
The whole business model fits in two sentences:
- Ship a CRM worth $29.90.
- Ship enough updates that telling a friend about it feels good.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Like reading these? I publish one of them a month, mixed with the TheCRM changelog. No marketing emails — just thinking-out-loud posts about indie software, solo business, and the boring underside of “modern” SaaS.