The thirty cents that killed the dollar tier
Stripe charges 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, which quietly confiscates a third of a one-dollar price. Payment rails set your price floor before customers do.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 4:31 (la tarifa de Stripe)
- ↳ video diary @ 5:10 (el dólar que no compensa)
- ↳ Entry 48-1: Pricing Divo, out loud (el esquema de ayer, corregido por la realidad)
Entry 48-1’s pricing scheme survived one day before reality edited it. Investigating payment platforms, GPT’s strong recommendation was Stripe, whose fee structure reads harmlessly until you do the math: 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction ▸ 4:31.
On a $10 subscription that’s fine. On the $1 day-pass it’s a confiscation: the platform keeps close to a third of the price, “no compensa, se queda casi con la mitad” ▸ 5:10. So the tier repriced itself: two dollars a day, the rest of the ladder intact ▸ 5:25.
el peaje fijo mata el precio chiquito →
The general law hiding in the anecdote: fixed per-transaction fees impose a price floor, and micro-pricing, the entire “poder de las masas” strategy, lives or dies on that floor. A dollar price loses 33% to rails; two dollars loses ~18%; ten loses ~6%. Anyone designing impulse-priced tiers has to design them after reading the fee table, not before. (The alternatives, credits bundles or annual passes, are all just ways of amortizing the 30 cents across more value.)
Same episode, same lesson at a different layer: Divo needs fonts, and the choice is Google Fonts’ free API (with daily call limits) versus self-hosting the ~1GB font corpus against Firebase’s free tier of 5GB storage and 3.3GB daily bandwidth ▸ 3:10. Every “free” infrastructure has a meter somewhere, and product design at zero budget is largely the art of knowing where all the meters are before they start running…