Every price Sharetribe has ever charged is now public

Many companies publish changelogs to help their audience keep track of updates to their products. They’re great for transparency, and they can also be a powerful marketing tool.

I've never seen a company publish a similar changelog to document the changes to its pricing, despite the fact that these changes likely happen relatively frequently. (Many experts recommend that SaaS companies should increase their pricing at least once per year).

At Sharetribe, we’ve decided to do this differently.

Our pricing changelog is now public and includes every pricing change we’ve made since the launch of our legacy product, Sharetribe Go, in 2014.

Why a public pricing changelog?

It's easy to understand why companies don't want to publish pricing changelogs. Saas pricing is not like pricing for physical products, where you calculate the cost of production per item and add your margin. Instead, Saas pricing is often value-based: aligned with the value customers are willing to pay for. So, it’s hardly in Saas companies’ interest to publicly communicate that their product used to be a lot cheaper, but they later realized they can charge more for it. Most companies want to maximize their profits, and when that’s your goal, you want to charge “the maximum the market will bear”.

At Sharetribe, our view on pricing is different. Our unique company structure guarantees profits will never be our end goal: they’re a means to achieving our mission. That mission is to democratize platform ownership, and our approach for reaching it is to make marketplace technology accessible to everyone. What follows from this mission is that our goal is to charge our customers as little as possible. The cheaper Sharetribe is, the more people have access to it.

This doesn't mean Sharetribe is free for everyone. We’re fully funded by our customers, and without this revenue, we wouldn’t be able to pursue our mission. To help our customers succeed, we need to run a sustainable business ourselves.

We also have commitments to honor. We’ve raised money from both public and private investors. Many startups aim to repay their investors by doing an "exit": selling the company or going public. We will never do either: our company structure explicitly prevents both. This means we need to pay our investors back from our profits. To ensure that generating profits for our investors doesn't become the primary goal, we've capped these returns: investors will receive back five times their original investment. (A capped return model also exists for our founders and early team members.)

To honor these commitments to investors and the early team, we hope to generate several million in profits in the coming years. Eventually, though, all these paybacks will be complete. At that point, we’re free to decide how to best invest our profits to serve our mission. We might choose to invest in building adjacent products or donate to causes close to our mission. But it might just as well be that, we simply lower our pricing to make our products more accessible.

All this means our approach to pricing is a constant balancing act between ensuring we make a sufficient profit while keeping our pricing accessible, so that thousands of marketplace founders around the world can pursue their dreams.

In such a situation, we feel that creating a public pricing changelog makes perfect sense. It's a great way for us to hold ourselves accountable: whenever we're considering a pricing change, we need to be able to justify why it's the right thing to do from the perspective of our mission.

Even though the changelog is brand new, we’ve chosen to retroactively update it to include every change to our pricing since we released our first no-code marketplace builder back in 2014. This allows our customers to see how the price they are paying today compares with what founders who came before them used to pay.

This was an interesting exercise, which allowed us to reflect on how our pricing has evolved over the years and why. I'll highlight a couple of these reflections below.

Our pricing has changed relatively little in 10+ years

When we launched our first product in 2014, the most expensive plan was $299 per month. Today, 11 years later, it's $369 a month. In 2014, we had a plan that cost relatively little, starting at $39 per month. However, we soon discovered that it wasn’t sustainable. Starting in 2016, the price of the cheapest Sharetribe plan, which allows launching a fully functional marketplace, has been at least $79 per month. Today, nine years later, it's $99 a month.

In fact, when adjusted for inflation, our prices are already lower today than they were in 2014. For example, US inflation has totaled over 35% since 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (you can use their CPI Inflation Calculator to compare the value of money across time).

This probably means we're leaving some money on the table, but we're fine with that. We optimize for our purpose, not profits.

A pricing change doesn't always mean an increase

Looking at the changelog, many of the changes are price increases, but not all of them. Sometimes, changes have resulted in significant price decreases, at least for some of our customers. For example, our earlier pricing was based on a percentage of the customer’s payment volume. The challenge with this model was that some of our customers had very active marketplaces but didn't process payments, which sometimes meant our costs for hosting these marketplaces were greater than what they were paying us. Meanwhile, others had relatively infrequent but large transactions, so they were paying us huge sums even though they consumed our APIs very little. 

Because of this, we switched to a model we have at the time of this writing, which is based on the number of transactions per month. Our average revenue per customer declined slightly after this change, as some customers saw a significant drop in their pricing. However, we feel that the overall balance is now better, as the price our customers pay is more closely connected to how actively they use our services.

Another example comes from 2024, when we launched the new Sharetribe. Initially, the cheapest plan that allowed launching a fully functional marketplace with transactions started from $199. After a couple of months, we came to the conclusion that this was too steep for many, and we needed a more affordable alternative. A "Lite" plan, starting at $99 per month, was added.

Nobody has a custom discount

One of our pricing principles is "No custom discounts". The majority of our customers are bootstrapping entrepreneurs, which means they understandably reach out to us often to request a discount.

Their stories are often really moving, and we often feel a strong urge to help them. But the reality is that it would be impossible to choose who deserves a discount and who doesn't. Over the years, we've come to the conclusion that the best way for us to pursue our mission is to keep our pricing transparent and fair. It's not possible for anyone to negotiate a custom deal with us: this isn’t something we do. Instead, we keep our prices as low as possible for everyone.

We do have some general discount policies. Annual subscriptions come with a discount on the monthly price. Non-profits receive a 25% discount. Founders who are part of our community partners' networks can claim benefits that include a temporary discount for new customers.

There are also other, relatively rare scenarios where someone might have exceptional pricing. In some cases, it could be due to an experimental pricing plan we discontinued. For example, we once tried offering a group discount of 20% off for the second and subsequent subscriptions if someone was running multiple marketplaces. In other cases, the pricing might stem from an early bird offer. For instance, before launching Sharetribe Flex, we sold it for a pre-launch price of $300 per month. 

Sometimes, exceptional pricing is the result of a mistake on our part. If we fell short on supporting a customer and they ended up making a less-than-optimal decision about their subscription, we’ve offered a few free months as compensation. 

But we don't do custom deals based on negotiation. Today, we have more than 1,300 paying customers in 70+ countries around the world, and none of them have a custom pricing deal. The majority of our customers are paying the prices you see on our website. 

There's one major exception: if we increase our pricing, we nearly always offer legacy pricing for our existing customers. Pricing only increases for new customers. On some occasions, legacy pricing isn’t possible, as it would create an unsustainable situation for us, but we do it whenever we can.

In the changelog, every pricing change includes information about whether legacy pricing was offered or not.

Final words

Releasing our pricing changelog feels a bit uncomfortable. What if our customers don't agree with the choices we've made and challenge us on them? What if we regret this later when we notice pricing changes are harder to make when everything is publicly visible?

But then again: if we do things customers disagree with, they should have that information and be able to challenge us. Being accountable is, and should be, uncomfortable. Sometimes, you just have to take the leap and trust that good things will come from living your values.

I'm secretly hoping our example inspires other companies to create their own pricing changelogs. It would certainly increase my trust in a company whose customer I am if they had such information available. Sometimes, we've seen SaaS companies whose products we used do massive pricing increases (in worst cases, a 10X increase), and we've read between the lines that this is because they raised a large round of venture capital and now need to demonstrate accelerating revenue growth. I can understand the rationale, but I’d love to see them be transparent about it.

If you do end up publishing your pricing changelog, or see someone else do it, let me know on LinkedIn!