Pricing at one year: what we're changing in Q2
The pricing experiment continues. Two new tier lines, one that's retiring, and the reasoning behind each move after a year of published pricing and real customer usage patterns.
A year ago we published our pricing on the website with a commitment to keep it there. Nine months ago we wrote about what we’d learned 90 days in. This is the one-year view — what we’re changing in Q2 2026, and why.
What’s changing
Three moves, in order of importance:
1. Retiring the “Starter” tier. We introduced Starter for teams under five seats doing fewer than 10 responses a quarter. A year in, the data says nobody should be on it. Every Starter team either (a) outgrew it within six months and moved to Team, or (b) stayed on Starter but stopped using the product — which is a failure mode, not a retention mode. The tier was supposed to be a ramp; it became a trap for teams who needed more but didn’t know it. We’re sunsetting Starter as of April 15. Existing Starter customers move to Team at their current ACV for 12 months.
2. Adding a new “Team + Federal” line. About 40% of our current Team-tier customers do federal work. Federal work adds specific compliance overhead on our side — FedRAMP alignment, specific data residency, US-citizen-only support coverage — and we’ve been absorbing the cost. The new line runs at roughly 1.8x the Team price and includes the federal compliance surface explicitly. Existing Team-tier federal customers can stay at Team pricing through their current renewal, then move to Team + Federal.
3. Introducing a “Platform” tier. For our largest customers — three enterprise agreements so far — we’ve been doing custom contracts that are really variations on a theme. The theme is now a published tier: higher concurrency, dedicated worker pools, a named solution engineer, and a custom SLA. Platform-tier ACV starts at $240k/year. Listed on the pricing page, negotiated on the specifics.
What we’re not changing
The publishing commitment. Every tier line on our pricing page has a specific ACV and a specific list of what’s included. We’re not moving to “contact us” for any tier, including Platform. We wrote about why opacity is a market signal in pricing-opacity-market-signal; our position on that is firmer, not softer, after a year.
The Team tier ACV. Team is our workhorse. We’ve held its price flat for a year while the model costs underneath it have roughly halved. That’s on purpose. Raising Team-tier price would be a signal to the market that we’re optimizing for margin; keeping it flat is a signal that we’re optimizing for volume and trust. Both are defensible; we’re choosing the second.
Transparent usage. Every customer’s usage dashboard shows exactly what they’ve consumed this billing period — drafts, tokens, retrieval calls, storage. No mystery line items. No “platform fees.” No overage traps that customers discover at renewal.
Why now
Three reasons the Q2 2026 window is the right time:
Federal fiscal-year Q2 is our peak new-enterprise-deal season. Federal procurement patterns we covered in October’s federal FY clock post push a lot of new-vendor decisions into March and April. A pricing change in February would have interrupted Q1 deals; a change in May would miss the window. Q2 start is the cleanest cutoff.
A year is enough data. Less than that and you’re optimizing on noise. More than that and the market has moved on without you. Twelve months of Starter data, twelve months of Team data, and six months of Platform-shaped custom deals is a defensible basis for the three moves above.
Our underlying cost structure has stabilized. A year ago, model costs were moving weekly. We couldn’t price against them with any confidence. Now they’re moving quarterly at most, and the direction is still downward. That means I can set Team + Federal at 1.8x Team and not worry that the federal-specific cost surface inverts in six months.
The trade-offs I’m still uncertain about
Retiring Starter leaves a gap for the two-person proposal shop doing a handful of responses a year. That’s a real customer type. The honest answer is we don’t have a product that serves them well, and trying to fit them into Team is more expensive than the value they’d get. I’d rather tell them that directly than keep a tier on the page that we know isn’t serving them.
The Platform tier’s $240k floor is a public commitment that we’ll negotiate enterprise contracts above that number but not below. We’ve walked away from three potential deals in the last six months that couldn’t clear the floor. That’s the right call — below $240k the dedicated-engineering cost model doesn’t pencil — but it means we’re not the right answer for a mid-market team that wants enterprise treatment at mid-market pricing. Which is fine. But it’s worth naming.
The Team + Federal tier is the one I’m least sure about. Customers who need federal compliance are also the customers least likely to be moved by a price change — they have fewer alternatives. So the new tier is partially a tax on a captive segment, which I’m not thrilled about. The counter is that absorbing the federal compliance cost inside Team meant every non-federal Team customer was implicitly subsidizing it, which isn’t fair either. The Team + Federal line makes the cost explicit. I’ll know in six months whether the pricing is right; the margin analysis after a quarter will tell us.
What stays on the page
The pricing page (bidforge.com/pricing) updates April 15. The old Starter row stays visible, marked “discontinued,” with the sunset date. The two new rows appear with full detail. Nothing is behind a “contact sales” gate.
The takeaway
A year of published pricing gives you more negotiating leverage than opacity does, not less. We’re doubling down on that.