You shipped an MCP server, agent orchestrator, LLM router, eval framework, or Cursor extension. People are using it. Stars are climbing. But you're paying inference bills while everyone else pays nothing – and you have no idea what to charge, how to gate features, or how to turn your GitHub audience into paying customers without torching the community you built. This playbook gives technical founders and indie developers a structured path from free traction to real revenue. It's built specifically for inference-heavy AI dev tools, where token costs make standard SaaS pricing math dangerously wrong and where your buyers are developers who distrust marketing on sight. You'll work through the unit economics of your actual COGS before touching a pricing page, choose a pricing model that fits how your tool consumes compute, learn which features to gate without triggering an open-source backlash, and write positioning copy that converts skeptical technical buyers. Then you'll sequence your GTM across GitHub, Hacker News, Product Hunt, and Discord – and use the first 90 days of real revenue signal to tune pricing, packaging, and messaging until the numbers work.
What's included
- A token-cost unit economics framework that walks you through calculating your true COGS – including inference, infrastructure, and margin targets – so you set a price that doesn't quietly lose money at scale
- A pricing model selection guide covering the structures that fit inference-heavy tools (usage-based, seat-based, hybrid, and others), with the tradeoffs laid out so you can match the model to how your tool actually runs
- An open-source-to-paid conversion strategy that identifies which features to gate, which to keep free, and how to frame the transition so your existing community stays intact and converts rather than forks
- A pricing page and positioning section with copy frameworks written for technical buyers – including how to handle the 'I'll just self-host it' objection and how to make value legible to developers who skip marketing language
- A developer GTM sequencing plan covering GitHub, Hacker News, Product Hunt, and Discord – with a channel-by-channel approach for turning existing traction into paid launch momentum
- A paid-tier launch and iteration guide that walks you through shipping your first monetized version and using early behavioral and revenue signals to tune pricing, packaging, and messaging after launch
