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Cheap for humans. Expensive for corporations. Progressive, not flat.
Nobody else does this. Salesforce charges $330/seat whether you're a solo founder or JPMorgan. Adobe charges $69.99 whether you're a student or Disney. The entire SaaS industry uses flat pricing that favors the rich and crushes the poor.
BlackRoad inverts it.
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Notice: Most companies charge enterprises 1.5-4x what individuals pay. Salesforce is the outlier at 13-22x. Nobody charges 10-100x progressively.
$15.95/mo for 20 questions = $0.80/question. For a 50-problem assignment that's $40 if you hit the cap. Students hated it.
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CONSUMER (Humans, Students, Creators)
| Tier | Price | What You Get | Who It's For |
|------|-------|-------------|-------------|
| Free | $0 | Sign up → 500 free solves/queries across all products | Everyone. Students. Curious people. |
| Student | $5/mo | Unlimited tutor solves + basic chat + search | Students who burned through 500 |
| Creator | $10/mo | All products, Lucidia memory, canvas, video, cadence | Indie creators, freelancers |
| Pro | $20/mo | Everything + API access + agent orchestration | Power users, developers |
| Max | $50/mo | Everything + priority inference + extended memory | Heavy users who LOVE it |
Hard cap: $100/mo. No individual human ever pays more than $100. Period. That's the ceiling. If you're a person, $100/mo gets you EVERYTHING forever.
BUSINESS (Small Teams, Startups)
| Tier | Price | What You Get | Who It's For |
|------|-------|-------------|-------------|
| Team | $75/mo | 5 seats, shared memory, team agents | Small team (2-5 people) |
| Startup | $100/mo | 10 seats, API, priority support | Growing startup |
| Business | $200/mo | 25 seats, SLA, dedicated agents | Real business |
Hard cap: $200/mo. If you're a small business under the SEC accredited thresholds ($200K income / $1M net worth), you never pay more than $200. Build your company on BlackRoad without it becoming your biggest expense.
ENTERPRISE (The Companies We're Taking Market Share From)
| Tier | Price | What You Get | Replaces |
|------|-------|-------------|----------|
| Enterprise S | $300/mo | 50 seats, SOC 2, audit trail | Slack ($12.50/seat × 50 = $625) |
| Enterprise M | $500/mo | 100 seats, SSO, SAML, LDAP | Salesforce Starter ($25/seat × 100 = $2,500) |
| Enterprise L | $1,000/mo | 250 seats, dedicated infrastructure | Multiple SaaS ($5,000-10,000/mo typical) |
| Enterprise XL | $2,000/mo | 500 seats, custom agents, white-label | Enterprise suite ($10,000-25,000/mo) |
| Enterprise XXL | $4,000/mo | 1,000 seats, full sovereignty stack | Salesforce Enterprise ($165/seat × 1,000 = $165,000) |
| Enterprise Max | $8,000/mo | Unlimited, on-prem deployment, custom everything | SAP/Oracle ($50,000-500,000/mo) |
These prices are STILL cheaper than incumbents. At $8,000/mo for unlimited enterprise, BlackRoad is 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than what enterprises currently pay for fragmented SaaS stacks.
| Tier | Price | Users needed for $29K MRR | Margin |
|------|-------|--------------------------|--------|
| Free → Student ($5) | $5/mo | 5,800 | 97% |
| Creator ($10) | $10/mo | 2,900 | 97% |
| Pro ($20) | $20/mo | 1,450 | 97% |
| Enterprise M ($500) | $500/mo | 58 | 97% |
| Enterprise XL ($2,000) | $2,000/mo | 15 | 96% |
15 enterprise customers at $2,000/mo = the same revenue as 5,800 free-to-$5 conversions. That's the dual motion: cheap for humans feeds adoption, expensive for corporations feeds revenue.
For Students: 500 free solves is roughly a semester. By the time they hit the paywall, they KNOW the product works. $5/mo is less than a single Starbucks drink. Chegg was $15.95/mo for 20 questions. BlackRoad is $5/mo for unlimited. No comparison.
For Creators: $10/mo for canvas + video + cadence + writing + AI memory + search. Adobe charges $69.99 for LESS. The value is obvious.
For Enterprises: $500/mo for 100 seats = $5/seat. Salesforce charges $25-330/seat. The pitch writes itself: "Everything Salesforce does, sovereign, $5/seat instead of $165."
For BlackRoad: 97% margins at every tier. Break-even moves from 4 users ($29/mo each) to 1 enterprise ($500/mo). The economics get BETTER as you move up-market.
Traditional SaaS: charge everyone the maximum they'll tolerate.
BlackRoad: charge humans the minimum that sustains the business, charge corporations the price that steals their vendor's market share.
The SEC accredited threshold ($200K income / $1M net worth) is the dividing line. Below it: you're a human, we protect you, max $100-200/mo. Above it: you're a business, you can afford fair pricing that's still cheaper than what you pay now.
This isn't charity. It's strategy. Cheap consumer tiers drive adoption. Adoption drives network effects. Network effects drive enterprise demand. Enterprise demand drives revenue. Revenue funds development. Development improves the product. The product stays cheap for humans.
The flywheel is: free humans → happy humans → employed humans recommend to employers → employers pay enterprise → enterprise revenue funds more free for humans.
BlackRoad was incorporated via Stripe Atlas. Stripe handles everything:
1. Create Stripe products/prices for each tier ($5, $10, $20, $50, $75, $100, $200, $300, $500, $1K, $2K, $4K, $8K)
2. Build auth-gated usage tracking — count solves per user in D1
3. 500 free solves — no payment needed, tracked by IP/cookie then by account
4. $5/mo upgrade flow — in-app "You've used 450 of 500 free solves. Unlimited for $5/mo."
5. Pricing page at blackroad.io/pricing with honest comparison to Chegg, Adobe, Salesforce
Sources:
Part of BlackRoad OS — sovereign AI on your hardware.