Price it, then give it away

Ship it, and see if they miss it ends on a question. Hand the thing to people for free, briefly, take it away, and ask whether they miss it. If they come back for it, you have something. That is the right test and it has a gap in it, which is what happens next. "Something" is not a product until it has a shape, a price and a way of being delivered that does not break you on the tenth customer.

This chapter is about that step, and about the part that is easy to leave out: free is never free for the other side. Everything in it is from experience, mine and the people I work with. It is not financial advice, and the prices in it are the ones I published, on the dates I say, not a rule for yours.

Four moves, in order

The step after "do they miss it" is four moves.

Define the product. Not the technology, the thing somebody receives. For RiskMandate the thing is an Agent Behaviour Policy for one agent, as an encrypted vault the customer holds the keys to, with the mandate corrected for their deployment. That sentence took weeks to get to, and it is the product. If you have spent twenty-five years in your field you will find this move harder than it looks, because you know too much about the problem and the sentence has to leave most of it out.

Price it, at a number that makes sense to you. Not a number from a competitor's page: a number you would be content to be paid. RiskMandate's ladder, as published on 2 October 2026, is four tiers: £10 for the pack downloaded, £50 for a working vault, £500 for the vault corrected for your situation, £1,500 for two sessions and a professional's signature. The first two are automated. The third is an email thread: we send prompts, the customer runs them, we build the vault and the policy from what comes back. The fourth adds people's time on both sides. A price is a statement of what you think the thing is worth, and you are about to test the statement.

Find a way to deliver it at a cost that grows a step at a time. This is the move that was not available a year ago and the reason to do this now. The agentic workflow means the marginal customer costs a little more, not a lot more. The vault is provisioned by an agent, the policy is drafted by an agent from the customer's prompts, a person corrects it. The cost of serving the twentieth customer is close to the cost of serving the second. That is linear, not exponential, and it is the condition under which you can afford the fourth move.

Then offer it, free, to the people who already know you. Early adopters, power users, past customers who paid for something before it was finished. RiskMandate's early access programme went live on 30 September 2026, invite only: twenty places, the £500 tier given away, to "people who already run an agent with real access: a mailbox, a code host, a workflow tool, a CRM". The ask of each member is "Twenty minutes for the prompts, and a reply; half an hour on a call." The page does not say the price, and it should not; the price is for the people who come after.

Two small rules for the offer. Do not make them apply. "Apply for a chance to be considered" asks for work before there is anything in hand, and it inverts the relationship: they are doing you a favour by using the thing. "We have twenty of these in the first round. Would you like one? If not, I will give it to someone else" is honest about scarcity and leaves nothing to do but say yes or no. And reward the people who were there early, and say that is why they are getting it. It is a thank-you that is also the best possible test group, because they know enough to tell you where it is wrong, and their silence means the most.

Free is not zero

Here is the thing I was careful about in the memo behind this, because it is easy to say in a way that sounds like a lecture. When you give something away, or when you say "this is worth five hundred pounds and I would like you to have it", you are not making a zero-cost offer. You are asking the other side to engage. To read the message. To think about whether it applies to them. To weigh it against everything else on their list. To find twenty minutes for the prompts and half an hour for a call. To fit a new thing into a team that already has a way of working.

None of that is zero, and all of it is paid by them. A price, oddly, can help here: it says the thing is serious and that you expect it to be used, which is a reason to find the twenty minutes. But whether the price is five hundred pounds or nothing, the attrition you place on the other side is real, and it is the first thing to measure. How long from the message to the first reply. How many never replied. How many started the prompts and stopped. How many asked a question the message should have answered.

Then the exercise is to cut it. The service you want is the one that costs you the least to provide and costs the customer the least to receive: no overhead on them, no overhead on deployment, no second tool to install, no account to create. Those are product decisions, and the programme is where you find out which ones you got wrong, while the people finding out for you are people who like you.

Be plain about the two outcomes, because one of them is a bad day and the exercise only works if you are ready for it. If people take the offer, run the prompts, read the vault, send corrections and ask what else there is, you have a product, and the next question is price: is £500 too low for what they got, does the £1,500 tier sell itself once someone has had the £500 one free. If people say it is interesting and then do not find the time, or say it does not fit how their team works, or start and stop because the vault was harder to open than the message implied, you do not have a product yet. You might have a technology, or an idea, or a document people would read if someone else did the work. "A commercial product is one people take when the only cost is their own attention." That is the drawing board, and the sooner you are at it the cheaper it is. Neither outcome is a marketing problem. If friendlies will not take it free, a bigger audience will not take it either.

Pay after the value

Now the shape of the price itself, and a bias I would like you to notice in yourself before you choose one.

Almost every time I buy something, I am buying future value. A subscription, a gym membership, a big security product on a good deal, even a one-off purchase I expect to use for years: I am betting that I will use it enough for the price of each use to fall to a number I accept. Often I lose the bet, and the cost of leaving keeps me paying. The research agrees. In a study of three gyms, members on a flat monthly fee of over $70 attended on average 4.3 times a month, paying more than $17 a visit when a ten-visit pass would have cost $10 a visit.

So do not reach for a subscription by default. A subscription is a discount for regular use, not rent on something somebody ignores. Where you can, turn the bet round: start the user with credit, charge for the share they actually use, let the balance go below zero, and ask for payment when the value is in view. By then the person can see what they received, and the payment is connected to it rather than to a hope.

The newsroom runs that experiment, and the reader at read/ on this site runs by the same rules. Everyone starts with £5 of credit. A new article read to the end costs 10p, an older one 5p, and only as far as you read, so the first screen costs a penny. Your balance can go below zero and stay there; nothing is blocked and nothing nags. When you want to, you top up £5, with no account and nothing that renews. I should say plainly that there are no results yet. The hypotheses were written before the first payment, and the review is on 6 December 2026; the gym study explains the psychology, not our numbers.

The counter-example I keep in mind is Wikipedia, which I value enormously. Its fundraising raised US$184.5 million in 2024 to 2025 from 7.7 million donors, an average of about ten dollars. But the ask arrives once a year, as a lump sum, at a moment when the value is not in view, for something that is worth a few pence an article. Imagine the same ask with your year of reading in front of you. A penny an article for four hundred articles is £4, and it is easier to give when you can see the four hundred.

There is a condition, and it is the one that decides whether this shape is for your company. It only works where there is a very large gap between the cost of serving and what you can charge. A static site on a CDN has that gap in the extreme: the cost of one more reader reading one more page is close to nothing, so even at 10p the margin is very high. A business with a real cost per unit cannot let balances run negative for ever. If your product is the £500 tier above, with a person's hours in it, the meter is the wrong shape; the ladder is the right one. Know which you are.

Three more things make a price fairer, and I think more successful. Fair by country: 10p in the UK is not 10p everywhere, and prices should follow local purchasing power, the way The Economist's Big Mac index compares currencies. Visible: a reader should see what the money pays for; in one field experiment at an amusement park, people allowed to pay what they wanted for a photo paid about 92 cents, and when half of what they paid went to charity, fewer bought but they paid an average of $5.33. And chosen, at more than one level: a verified fact, a follow-up, a briefing with every claim checked are things people pay for separately, because they need them.

Pence only work aggregated

One piece of arithmetic before you price anything in pence, because it caught me and it will catch you.

Stripe's standard UK card rate is 1.5% plus 20p. On a £20 payment that is 2.5%. On £5 it is 5.5%. On 50p it is 41.5%, and on 10p the fee is more than the payment. Below about £5, the fixed fee is the price.

So payments of pence only work aggregated: one charge a year that covers many things, or a platform that already holds a balance and settles in bulk. That is why the newsroom's meter prices a page at a few pence against £5 of credit settled as one balance, and never charges the card per page. Above £2 or £3 the difference is smaller than you would expect; it is below about £1 that aggregation decides whether the model exists at all.

And tie payment to a verified person who receives something, not to a count. When tea.xyz rewarded package popularity with tokens, one developer published nearly 14,000 packages. Anything you pay for by the number will be gamed by the number.

Put the four moves together and the order is the lesson. Price it first, because the price is the claim. Give it away second, to people who know you, because that is the cheapest honest test of the claim. Measure what it cost them, and cut it. Then, and only then, worry about the shape of the payment, because the shape is a detail until somebody wants the thing enough to miss it.