Nobody enjoys sending that email. It doesn’t matter how solid your reasoning is, how much you dress it up, how many caveats you add. Nobody reads "we're raising your subscription price" and goes “YAY!”. I’ve done it many times before, before Herodesk, so I know what it’s about.

There are many ways to raise prices. For me, at least, it’s not something we just do as a quick fix. It’s a very well-considered and prepared decision.

There's a version of this that runs on autopilot. Annual price adjustment, tied to inflation, baked into the terms of service, nobody even has to send an email because it's already in the fine print. Set it, forget it, move on. Typically an enterprise play.

I think that model is lazy, and I don’t want to run Herodesk that way.

The (now) old prices at Herodesk were set more than two years ago. Since then, two things happened that made me think now is the time to adjust the prices.

The boring one: our own infrastructure costs went up over 30% this year alone. We don't own the hardware; we rent server capacity, and the entire compute market has been devoured by AI companies building out data centres en masse and buying all the servers they can get their hands on. That cost increase is real.

But that's not why I raised prices. That's the floor, not the reason.

The second (and actual) reason is the one I keep coming back to, because it's a principle I had before I ever started Herodesk: price should follow value, not the other way around. You ship the product first. You prove it delivers. Then, and only then, does the price catch up to what you already built.

Two years of shipping features, improvements, fixing the rough edges, and adding the things our ~300 customers actually asked for have made the product we have today not the product we priced two years ago. There's a gap now between what Herodesk costs and what it's actually worth to the people using it. Raising prices closes that gap. It aligns the product's price with the value our customers get from it.

Honestly: It’s only fair.

That's why I didn't do the quiet inflation-adjustment thing. An automatic annual bump treats price as a maintenance cost, something you tick up mechanically regardless of whether you've earned it. Sure, you can do the whole “inflation”-argument thing. But, yeah, I want the opposite relationship. I want price increases to be rare, deliberate, and directly tied to something we can point to and say: here's what changed, here's what you're getting now that you weren't getting before.

There's a legal mechanic underneath all of this too. Per our terms and conditions, we are required to give at least 30 days’ notice before changing pricing on existing subscriptions, so we built the rollout around that. New customers get the new number from day one in August. Existing customers get it on their next renewal in September.

Some customers will probably cancel over this. I’m not hoping for it, obviously. But that's going to happen no matter how well I explain the reasoning, no matter how fair the increase actually is. And you know what? It’s fine. It is what it is.

If a customer looks at this price increase and decides Herodesk isn't worth it anymore, I'd bet they were going to churn eventually regardless. Even with the new pricing, we are still priced well below what we could reasonably and with good conscience charge for the value we deliver. If a business genuinely cannot absorb a modest, honestly-explained price adjustment for a tool that runs their customer support, that business has a different problem, and it's not one I can solve with a pricing page.

And there’s one more thing. Because, on top of all of this, our pricing adjustments also come as preparation for something very, very big that we are planning.

I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet, though. September isn't just the month when the new prices take effect. It's also when we're shipping the biggest updates so far. The price increase and the product update are connected.

I will be telling more about this on August 10th.

Herodesk is a ten-year bet. €25M ARR by 2035, fully bootstrapped, fully remote, doesn't happen by holding prices flat while our costs and the product outgrow them. It happens by making occasionally unpopular calls like this one, at the right moment, for the right reasons, and then building the thing that justifies them.

I'd rather explain a price increase honestly and lose a few customers than never raise prices and slowly starve the thing I'm actually trying to build.

Stay tuned!

A three-man developer team powered by Claude Code now, in three weeks, produce the same output that would have taken 10 men many months to do. It’s insane. And amazing!

… and expensive! But hey, compared to having two or three times as many developers, it’s cheap. I don’t know, it feels expensive because “it’s just tokens”, but honestly, it’s cheap compared to the alternative. And fast. Wow, just wow.

New releases in Herodesk:

Last month, I wrote about the big release we have coming up in September. I talked about calling it a “Summer ‘26 release” like many others do. I’ve decided to go in a different direction. Partly because I don’t want to set expectations that we’re gonna do big summer and winter releases every year. We do it when we have something to release. And partly because what we’re working on is lifting us into another league. So it deserves a concept - something we can build on and tell a story about. I am so excited to tell you more about this. Stay tuned!!

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