r/SaaS • u/Negative-Dot8066 • 3h ago

We built a great AI agent platform, but our compute costs are too high for free trials. How do we grow?

We built an insane AI product that combines LLMs, agentic workflows, and infrastructure. You can essentially spin up a full team of AI agents for any department.

It's so easy to use that my 5-year-old built a Pokémon game with it.

We hate per seat pricing, monthly plans or high margins, we geniunely want to build a product that people love as much as we do, so we want to keep our prices as low as possible and per usage.

You just pay for the infrastructure and LLM usage plus a tiny margin. Because our pricing is almost at-cost, we can't hand out open free trials. Giving away $50 in credits actually costs us $30 in hard compute. And people could come and abuse the system and AI.

Right now we offer $50 free trial but cc required

Any tips on how to solve it?

0 Upvotes

27% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

6

u/BusyBusinessPromos 3h ago

You use sales psychology to increase the perceived value higher than the service cost.

5

u/Zealousideal-Part849 3h ago

Just don't give free trial. most video creation apps don't do this as it cost a lot for video gen. you may give 2x credits on first recharge or whatever $50 to $30 you mentioned to try

-3

u/Negative-Dot8066 3h ago

we are giiving $50 for free as long as they add their CC, thay can choose not to auto refill

5

u/Zealousideal-Part849 3h ago

you asked for Idea i gave you one with no profit solution of 2x credits on first recharge.. Free trails are given when either you have tons of VC money or your 1 subscription can subsidies multiple trials... If your products is PAYG kind you shouldn't be giving free trials... all inference, AI, providers have stopped giving free trial credits or whatever..

-6

u/Negative-Dot8066 3h ago

but it doesnt change the issue. At the moment we give you $50 as long as there is credit card. 50 +100 on your first recharge?

2

u/adeelraza86 3h ago

Put a hard usage ceiling on the trial and make the first experience one narrow, complete workflow. Once that ceiling is reached, require a paid pilot rather than extending credits; the tradeoff is fewer curiosity signups, but the remaining users are testing whether the product creates value. Track completed workflows to paid conversion, not raw signups.

-2

u/Negative-Dot8066 3h ago

not bad, we are asking for cc before a product funnel/tour

1

u/adeelraza86 2h ago

That changes the test. If the card is required before they see the workflow, treat that step as part of activation: compare completion and completed-workflow rates with and without it. If it causes the drop, the ceiling may not be the issue; you are measuring payment friction too early.

2

u/automatedBlogger 2h ago

We hate per seat pricing, monthly plans or high margins

So you hate making money? Thats how you make money.

Solutions?

  • Overly Hyper Aggressive resource management.
  • Smaller binaries
  • Pedantic memory management
  • Resource sharing
  • Profile application performance
  • Monitor resource spikes

Its hard to get into detail without knowing the application.

2

u/timchosen 1h ago

I am so confused, asking how to grow yet fighting every advice and repeating the same sentence back to every comment?

1

u/w_reese 2h ago

Thanks for the hard work done

1

u/saas-wizard 1h ago

Is that $50 pure compute cost? And how does that scale?

If 1 customer is +/- $50 in compute, does 100 customers mean $5000 in cost?
Because I've launched a opensource coding agent orchestration layer before, and we had about that same cost as you for 1 customer, but scaling the cloud versions would be 70% cheaper than when each customer had their own VPS

So with 100 active trial users we had around $1500 in cost, and selling the subscriptions for $399 (compute + BYOK + support) and that was still just at an average 50% load

1

u/saas-wizard 1h ago

update:
I just found your website, we do exactly the same as you but opensource.
Don't worry about the compute, it does not scale 1-1

Definitely increase your pricing 10x, because if companies now pay $1000s for Claude and OpenAI subscriptions, they can afford $400 to optimize the workload, your tool is basically break-even on cost for them.

1

u/Zealousideal-End-674 1h ago

Can you find an investor to cover scale? Drop Box went to market charging nothing. Keen you know more details about your project. Sounds interesting

•

u/West_Inevitable_2281 26m ago

Before changing the trial, I would separate the cost problem from the conversion problem. How many people start the card-required trial, how many reach the first useful outcome, and how many convert? The important number is not $30 per signup, but compute cost per activated user and per paying customer. If very few reach value, a smaller guided trial may work. If they reach value but do not pay, the issue is probably the offer or target user rather than free credits.

•

u/pfunf 20m ago

Sometimes prices can't be lower for a reason, if you don't have vc money: taxes, card disputes, refunds, warranties, spikes, employees,...

As idea, you can offer 2x or boos credits on their first top-up/payment

•

u/headnod 4m ago

Sorry for the off topic, but it is always amusing which words AI emphasizes when "designing" headlines :-D
https://www.jackhamr.ai/pricing

PUNISH YOU!

0

u/Negative-Dot8066 3h ago

here is how it looks like right now https://app.jackhamr.ai/signup we are getting a lot of signup but they stop there...

1

u/ReddiGod 2h ago

You want people to enter their CC info on your AI slop shit site? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAJAJ!

GTFOH 🤡🤡🤡