Founder pricing — locked forever, for the first wave

Founder pricing locks Solo at $9/month, Pro at $19/month, and Business at $39/month — for the life of the account. That includes future feature unlocks. Whatever we ship next year, you keep the rate.

This post is the operational explanation: what locked-forever means, how the lock works, why it's time-limited not seat-capped, the maths from our side, the philosophy from mine, and what happens after the window closes. If you came here from the homepage banner, this is the long form.

How the lock works

The lock is implemented as a Stripe coupon with `duration: forever` — applied at initial subscription creation, attached to your Stripe customer, and inherited by every subsequent invoice. That means the discount is structurally permanent. We can't reach into your account and remove it later, even if we wanted to. The only way to lose founder pricing is to cancel the subscription and re-subscribe outside the window.

A live countdown sits on the homepage and on the pricing page. Once the window closes, the rates revert to the standard $19 / $39 / $79 per month. Existing founder-priced accounts are unaffected — the coupon sticks to your customer record for as long as you keep the subscription active.

Why time-limited, not seat-capped

Seat caps train customers to wait. They look at '67 left' and refresh the page on a Tuesday hoping for an opening. Time windows train them to act. The launch lasts what it lasts; if you sign up inside the window, you keep the price; if you don't, you don't. It's a forcing function and we mean it.

There's a softer reason too. Seat caps imply scarcity — and Briefi isn't scarce. We're not gating supply for marketing optics. We're acknowledging that customers who join in week one are doing something more valuable than month-fifty customers, and we want to reward that without dragging it out across a year.

The maths, since you'd want to know

Launching a SaaS is not capital-intensive but it is reputation-intensive. Customers who join in week one are doing the most valuable thing — telling their friends. Pricing them at parity with month-fifty customers is, frankly, rude.

The numbers also work for us. A Pro account paying $19/month for life is better economics than no account paying $39/month because the buyer didn't trust the product enough to take the bet. Pricing risk is bidirectional; founder pricing closes both sides.

The philosophy

I'm building Briefi for myself first. I run it in my own workspaces every day, ship the features I need, and only then think about whether the broader market wants the same thing. The people who join in the first wave are taking the same bet I am — that the loop will keep improving, that the tool will keep getting better, that the price will stay where it is.

I want those people to feel that. Founder pricing is the contractual version of 'I won't price-raise you out of the product I sold you'. The lock is on Stripe's side because words aren't enough; the mechanism has to be structural.

What happens after the window closes

When the founder window closes, the homepage banner comes down and Solo / Pro / Business revert to standard pricing. Existing founder-priced accounts continue at their original rate forever. We don't run discount cycles, we don't do 'limited-time 50% off' emails three months from now, and we won't have founder pricing again. The first wave is the first wave.

If you're inside the window and you're considering Briefi, the call is straightforward. Take the founder rate. The cost of being early is two months of a product that's still finding its edges; the value of being early is a permanent rate lock on something we plan to spend ten years improving.

The countdown is live on the pricing page. For the underlying motivation, see why I built Briefi. And the architecture decision the pricing rewards — multi-workspace from day one — is in multi-workspace is not multi-tenancy.