Pricing — tier structure + rationale (v1 proposal)

Status: draft v1 (marketing-strategist). Product name <TBD>. Competitor pricing pages could not be fetched live (WebFetch blocked in this environment); prices below are from public pricing pages as of training cutoff January 2026 and must be verified before any public-facing use. Flagged inline.

TL;DR recommendation

Three tiers: Free / Pro / Pro+. Monthly-first with an annual discount. The Pro tier is the volume seller; Pro+ is the power user / serious-book tier.

Rationale for these boundaries below.

Feature matrix

Invariants baked in (per product guardrails)

• All tiers are passkey-only. No "password tier." Auth is a product invariant, not a SKU lever.
• GDPR DSR rights apply to every tier. Data export + deletion are never gated.
• Paper trading itself is never gated. Free users get full paper trading; only retention depth, strategy count, and AI volume scale by tier. This keeps Free genuinely useful — it is the demo and the trust-builder.

Competitor price anchors

Prices below are from public pricing pages as of training cutoff Jan 2026. Verify before public use. Fuzzy where noted.

Source-quality note: Composer and QuantConnect have both restructured pricing at least once in the last 18 months; tastytrade and IBKR are commission-model and don't have subscription tiers we'd directly compete on. Anchor with caution — the take-away is $20–$30 is the established mid-tier price point in adjacent SaaS, and $60–$80 is where "serious power user" tiers land.

Rationale for each boundary

Why $29 for Pro

• Sits just above Composer's ~$24 Pro and QuantConnect's ~$20 Quant Researcher. We are a narrower, higher-intent product (options-forward, AI proposals) — a modest premium is defensible.
• Below the $39/mo psychological line where retail traders start scrutinizing. $29 is a "credit-card autopay, don't think about it" price.
• Two months' Pro ≈ one SPX credit spread's worth of premium. If the product saves Pat from one blown trade/year, it's paid for 3×.

Why $79 for Pro+

• $50 delta over Pro is the minimum to justify a separate SKU without cannibalization.
• Lines up with QuantConnect team-tier entry and Composer's Premium tier.
• Targets traders with a book ≥ $100k who are running multiple concurrent strategies — the $79 is <0.1% of their book/month.

Why Free is generous on core, limited on retention

• Retention (90 days) is the right lever: new users get a full experience; the only thing that pushes them to Pro is needing to answer "how did my book do last quarter?" which is a real and frequent question for a weekly-options trader.
• Concurrent-strategies cap of 2 is the secondary squeeze. Pat runs 3–5 concurrent; Free forces the upgrade naturally.
• AI proposals at 25/month: enough to try the killer feature; not enough to run a real weekly book on the free tier.

Why monthly-first

Retail SaaS converts better on monthly; annual is an optimization. 2-months-free (≈17% discount) is the standard SaaS annual discount and is enough to matter without training users to wait for discounts.

Two alternatives the user should consider (proposals, not decrees)

Alt A — Two tiers (Free / Pro at $39). Simpler. Loses the top-tier power-user upsell. Recommend against: our primary persona will self-select into Pro+ if it exists, and we leave money on the table.

Alt B — Pay-per-AI-proposal metering instead of monthly. More defensible as "you pay for what you use," aligns cost with our AI inference spend. Risk: retail traders hate metered billing (Twilio, AWS). Recommend against for MVP; revisit for an enterprise tier later.

Recommended: three tiers, flat-rate SaaS, as specified above.

Open pricing questions (for user decision)

1. Founders promo: The original below-sticker waitlist offer is retired (decision on record 2026-04-23). See Founders Promo epic (#204) for the replacement: time-based engagement loop, 3 months free paper trading on Founders signup conversion.
2. Refund policy. Recommend 14-day no-questions refund on Pro/Pro+. Industry standard; low abuse rate in finance SaaS.
3. Data-vendor pass-through costs. If we add premium options-chain data (e.g., OPRA full depth), is that included in Pro+ or a separate add-on? Recommend add-on ($15/mo) so base tier pricing stays stable.

Implementation implications (for product-manager)

This tier matrix creates engineering scope around: billing integration, feature-flag gates (retention, concurrent strategies, AI proposal quota, rate limits), usage-metering, entitlement checks on the options-chain depth and broker connections, and UX for "you've hit your limit, upgrade" flows. See the handoff comments on the relevant PM issues — no cards filed by marketing directly.

Change log