DEV Community

Cover image for Lab Notes: What I Learned Dropping Imdone’s Price for a Week
imdone.io profile image Jesse Piaścik
Jesse Piaścik for imdone.io

Posted on

Lab Notes: What I Learned Dropping Imdone’s Price for a Week

#jira #productivity #workflow #saas

Last week I ran a small pricing experiment for imdone-cli and imdone desktop and told my list I’d share the results.

These are the lab notes.

If you just want the punchline:

Dropping the solo price from $18 to $9 helped, but the real problems are messaging and onboarding, not just dollars.

The hypothesis

Quick recap: imdone-cli and imdone desktop let you work with Jira issues as markdown files in your repo:

  • Pull issues, comments, and attachments into your project
  • Edit them in your editor or terminal
  • Push changes back to Jira

The core idea is: “Work Jira like code.”

Before the experiment, the price for individuals was:

  • $18/user/month

Signals I was seeing:

  • A steady trickle of pricing page visits
  • Almost no conversions at $18

So the hypothesis was simple:

“If I cut the solo price in half, do more individual developers actually pull the trigger?”

The experiment setup

For one week I:

  • Dropped the personal price from $18 → $9/month
  • Left team pricing at $18/user/month
  • Kept the homepage mostly the same so I didn’t change too many variables at once

The only intentional change at the decision point:

“You can get this for $9/month as a solo developer.”

No coupons, no bundles, no big launch. Just a price change.

The results

In the first ~24 hours:

  • 2 new paying customers signed up at $9/mo
  • That was more movement than I’d seen in the entire previous month at $18
  • Traffic looked similar; behavior at the point of decision changed

So:

  • Price did matter for solo devs
  • But lowering it didn’t suddenly unlock a huge wave of adoption

It was enough signal to make decisions, not enough to declare “pricing solved everything.”

What I’m keeping (and what I’m not touching)

✅ $9/month stays as the Personal License

The experiment confirmed what I suspected:

  • Individual devs are more price sensitive
  • $18/mo feels like “team tool” pricing
  • $9/mo feels like “personal workflow upgrade” territory

So $9/month stays as the personal plan.

✅ $18/user/month stays for teams

Teams behaved differently:

  • Existing team customers haven’t pushed back on $18
  • They see imdone as DevEx / workflow infrastructure
  • They care more about context and time than a few extra dollars

The experiment didn’t touch team pricing, and I’m not going to “race to the bottom” there.

So $18/user/month stays for teams.

Solo and team are now deliberately priced as two different markets.

Where the real bottleneck is

If you drop the price and don’t see a flood of new users, it usually means:

  • People don’t fully understand what the product actually does
  • It’s hard to picture how it fits into their current workflow
  • First-time setup feels heavy or risky
  • Time-to-first-value is too long

That’s what this experiment exposed.

So my next focus is:

  • Tightening the homepage copy around the core idea: “Your backlog lives in your repo, not your browser.”
  • Making it easier to go from “curious” → “first Jira pull into markdown”
  • Smoothing out docs and defaults so setup feels safe and fast

Price was friction, but not the friction.

Takeaways if you’re building dev tools

A few lessons I’d pass on:

  1. You don’t need a huge experiment to learn something.

    One week and one variable was enough to get real signal.

  2. Price is rarely the final boss.

    Dropping from $18 to $9 helped solo devs, but it didn’t magically fix adoption. It just revealed the next constraint.

  3. Solo devs and teams really are different markets.

    One feels $9 vs $18 personally; the other feels “how much context and time are we wasting?”

  4. If you call it an experiment, close the loop.

    Sharing what happened builds more trust than silently changing a number in Stripe.

If you’re curious about imdone

If you’re a solo dev who:

  • lives in Jira all day
  • keeps losing context between browser and editor
  • wants screenshots, comments, and “why we did this” next to the code

â€Ķthe $9/month personal plan is now the default.

If you’re on a team and want to pilot this with a few developers, that’s where team pricing comes in — and that’s usually where the biggest impact shows up.

If you’ve tried imdone and hit friction, I’d genuinely love to hear what slowed you down. That’s exactly what I’m working on next.

👉 https://imdone.io/plans

Top comments (0)