Pricing an earned tier

An earned tier is priced with three numbers the operator sets: what a post earns, how often one user can earn, and what conversation adds on top. Anchor the month, not the post: decide what a regular poster should come away with — and what an always-poster may reach — and the dials divide it. The rest of this page is the hour your team spends deciding those numbers well.

You don’t price an earned tier by counting single clicks. You price it by setting the mechanical limits of the console.

What is there to price?

Three dials, all yours. Earnesty never prices or caps what your users earn — the infrastructure has a subscription, and your reward economics are your product's.

The three dials of an earned tier.

What is the earned tier replacing?

Make it your only unpaid tier. If you run a free plan or a trial, fold it in; if you haven't set tiers yet, start here. Keep a small baseline that works for everyone — the product should never stop doing its job for a customer's customer — and let posting be the way past it. "Post to expand your plan" is a better story than "here's another tier," and it answers the objection every team raises first: nothing is being taken away. The baseline lives inside the earned tier; posting expands beyond it.

Sizing the baseline is the quiet half of the pricing decision. Set it where someone with real usage feels the wall in their first week or two — which is when they are most engaged, and most likely to post.

What should a reward be?

It depends on how you already price. If your tiers are amounts of a consumable — AI credits, tokens, messages — the reward is that same consumable. Your users already know what it is worth, free and paid already share the unit, and a post simply tops the meter up. Most AI products are in this case, and for them the reward decision is only an amount.

If your tiers are gated by capability instead, reward a taste of the capability itself — the thing a free user cannot do. Letting people feel the paid product sells the upgrade; handing them more of the free one only delays it.

What is a post worth?

Work backward from the month. The per-post number is the least decidable dial on its own — you don't yet know how often anyone will post — so decide the outcome instead: a regular poster should come away with a real plan's worth of reward (if you ran a free plan, its monthly allowance is the natural peg), and a user who posts every time they can should beat it. The split then does the rest: the claim value pays for the post; the reply bonus pays for its reach. Keep the base modest on purpose — the bonus is where a post that starts a real conversation earns its bigger number — and the promise stays legible: a post is worth the same whenever it is verified.

Bound it on both sides. Generous enough that posting feels obviously worth doing — a reward nobody would cross the room for buys you nothing. Not so rich that a handful of quiet posts costs more than it brings in. And if one user posts often and the posts perform, that is not a loophole to close; that is the program working.

How fast should one user earn?

The cooldown is the only rate limit, so it is also the entire per-user budget: a 7-day cooldown leaves room for about five earning posts in a rolling month, and five times the claim value is the ceiling from posts alone. The Earnesty console shows that ceiling while you adjust the numbers, so the arithmetic is never yours to carry. Set it against your margins, not your hopes.

Expect the ceiling to beat your old free allowance: a regular poster landing near the old month, an always-poster clearing it. That isn't a leak; it's the trade. An active poster out-earning your old free plan, month after month, is the distribution you're buying.

What do you call the reward?

The unit your users already buy — credits, tokens, messages, renders, months. A reward named in a unit people already spend needs no explanation, and the status page can say "your post earned 25 credits" in the vocabulary your pricing page already taught. Don't invent a point they have to convert in their head.

When do you revisit the numbers?

Whenever the evidence says to — none of this is permanent. A change applies to posts made from then on, and never reprices a post already made, so adjusting is cheap and honest by construction. Set the dials, watch a month of posts, and move them.

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