John Jago

Day 13: Pricing

I’m 14% of the way to 90 days, and I’m starting to think that “to make a living” by the end is going to be a stretch. It’ll be more like, “earning a little, with a good trajectory” in the best case.

My goal is to make Dashify profitable early, so that it can sustain me working on it without outside investment.

To achieve that, I’m going to follow the footsteps of the many other bootstrappers and indie hackers out there and charge money for what I’m making early on, and I think I can make it happen in a couple weeks.

After making Dashify compatible with a popular subscriptions plugin, I’ll create the first “Pro” version of Dashify which includes that compatibility, on top of everything in the free version. From then on, any major new functionality, especially that which would be useful to large ecommerce stores, I’ll include in the Pro version, while keeping basic features in the free version.

If nothing else comes up, my only two goals for the coming weeks will be building that compatibility, and then building out how I’m going to distribute the paid version of the plugin, which I expect to be a decently sized engineering project that covers some kind of licensing mechanism, Pro plugin download distribution (WordPress sites need to pull updates from somewhere), and integration with some payment processor, likely Stripe.


👋 This is my work journal, a series where I write daily about trying to make a living building a bootstrapped software product.