37signals: Discussing Decisions! A Basecamp pricing experiment

☑ It’s not a true “per-seat” fee—it’s “per-employee,” keeping things affordable
▪️ Only company employees are counted. Freelancers and contractors? Free.
▪️ We’re testing with new customers only. Existing customers keep their current plan.
▪️ Cost? $11 per employee—lean and simple.

☑ We resisted per-seat pricing for years, fearing the shift toward big business.
▪️ We wanted to stay focused on small and mid-sized companies—the ones that got us here.
▪️ We avoided sales-heavy cycles, staying a product-first company.
▪️ But we lost something in our “one-size-fits-all” approach: the small freelancers and studios who felt priced out.

☑ Decision-making needs balance: bold moves with the right safety nets.
▪️ We set up a time-limited experiment (ends Dec 31st). We’ll check in, assess, and pivot if necessary.
▪️ If it doesn’t bring in more sign-ups or hurt our revenue per user, we’ll reconsider.
▪️ Honest experiments make us rethink what we took for granted about our market, our customers, and ourselves.

☑ Pricing decisions take time to fully understand—but bold changes help reveal blind spots.
▪️ When we moved to $99/month for all customers, we saw revenue per customer increase but noticed fewer sign-ups from small teams over time.
▪️ Losing our entry-level pricing over the years meant losing the core market of freelancers and small teams we’re closest to.
▪️ Experimenting with per-employee pricing might bring back this segment and grow our customer base over time.

☑ Timing matters when testing big changes.
▪️ With inflation impacting everyone, we’re cutting prices for small businesses, just when cost-cutting matters most.
▪️ For teams under 10, Basecamp is now more affordable than it’s been in years. We think it’s the right time to reintroduce Basecamp to those who may have thought it was out of reach.

☑ As founders, taking risks is part of the job—responsibly.
▪️ Founders have a unique responsibility to take risks for the long-term vision, not just short-term gains.
▪️ By framing this as a “helicopter drop” rather than inching forward in small steps, we’re truly testing if this change can make a difference.
▪️ And if it doesn’t work? We’ll adapt based on what we’ve learned.

When you focus on something that's concrete, it's a totally different territory than when you're talking about things in the abstract

If we freeze every decision we've ever made and say that's how it's going to be forever, we're going to miss out on a bunch of interesting things

We wanted to build a very heavily pro-product focused business, so that's why we didn't do per-seat pricing in the past

You see the effects of changes slowly… at that low end, the customers who would have come in before at $29, they didn't come

There are second-order effects of [pricing changes] that take longer to see... someone at $29 might tell someone else who would come in at $99

The longer you take and the more you invest into that decision, the harder it's going to be to treat it as temporary

Our primary job is to introduce more risk into the business, which is counterintuitive. It's a responsibility to take risks

I want to be dropped from a helicopter far away... you have to survive here now. We didn't want to be able to walk back, which is why we went for the $99

Existing customers stay where they are, new customers try this out for a few months. Make a little noise, but not too much noise

When there's a great turmoil in the world, this explosion of art comes… you get growth when there's pressure, fracture, and stress

Some of these decisions just take a long time, and then there's this inflection point where you suddenly go, okay, now's the time

You won't know until you try… the reality is, you won't have all the facts and will have to make a judgment call

Not everything has to be a huge calculation. Give it a try, and have the discipline to check back in three or six months and see if it worked

What does it mean to pan out? If we're signing up everybody who would have paid us $99 but are now only paying $55, in the short term that looks like a loss

Some of these things are second or third-order effects… sometimes you just don't know, and you have to be comfortable with that uncertainty