You only pay when you've made money

There are two honest ways to price a tool for people who are just starting out, and most companies pick a dishonest third. The dishonest one is to charge a subscription up front, on the promise that the tool will pay for itself later. It puts the risk entirely on the person with the least money and the least proof. We did not want to build that.

So the deal is plain. Everyone can list and take bookings for free. On a booking, we take a small, flat platform fee — the price of a chai — and that is it. No monthly charge to get started, no card to enter, nothing to lose. Free is not a trial that expires; it is a real place to run a real business.

The fee is a floor, not the business

A rupee or ten on a booking is not how a company survives, and we are not pretending it is. The flat fee covers the cost of moving the money and keeps a free booking from being a pure expense to us. It is a floor. The business — the part that actually pays our bills — is the subscription, and the subscription only earns its price once you are already earning yours.

That is the whole trick, and it is not really a trick. Instead of asking you to buy a subscription on faith, we wait until you have made money through us, then show you exactly what the free-plan commission has cost you this month. If that number is bigger than a plan, upgrading is arithmetic, not a leap. If it is not, stay free — you are not our profit centre yet, and pretending otherwise would just annoy you.

Why this is the right way round

Most pricing pages are built to extract the maximum on day one, before the customer has any evidence. That works until the customer notices, and in a market like India, with a link they can replace with a form in an afternoon, they notice. The version that survives is the one where our revenue only grows when the host's revenue grows first. We are not incentivised to squeeze a host who is not yet earning; we are incentivised to get them to their first, second, tenth booking.

It also keeps the free tier honest. A free plan that quietly hopes you never use it is a bait. Ours is meant to be used — it is the front door, the thing that gets a creator from nothing to their first paid booking. The money comes later, from success we helped create, or it does not come at all. Those are acceptable terms.

Charge for the win, not the hope. If your revenue only grows when your customer’s does, you will never have to trick them.

The bit worth keeping

If you want to see the maths on your own numbers, it lives right in your dashboard — the commission you have paid, and what a plan would have saved. Or just start taking bookings for free, get paid a few times, and let the arithmetic make the case when it is ready.