Charging early is the fastest honest signal available to a young company. Most founders delay it for reasons that feel principled and are not.
The standard advice is to give it away until people love it. That works for consumer products with network effects. For almost everything else it delays the only question that matters, which is whether anyone will trade money for this.
Free users teach you the wrong lesson
Enthusiasm is cheap when the price is zero. We have watched teams celebrate a thousand signups, then discover that converting even two percent required rebuilding the product for a different buyer entirely. The signal was never in the usage. It was in the invoice nobody had sent.
How to price when you have no idea
Pick a number that feels slightly uncomfortable to say out loud. Say it to ten prospects. Count how many flinch. If none do, the number is too low, which is the most common outcome and the easiest to fix.
We raised our price four times in a year. Every time we expected churn. Every time we got fewer, better customers and a shorter sales cycle.
The uncomfortable middle
There is a stretch where you are charging real money for a product that is not finished. It feels dishonest. It is not, provided you are clear about what exists today, and provided you fix what breaks quickly. Customers who buy in that window are the ones who will tell you the truth later.
One caveat worth stating. If your buyer is an individual spending their own money, the calculus changes and free trials do real work. The advice above is aimed at companies selling to other companies, which is most of what we fund.