carlos / platform Public

pricing: the 50% discount draws on the pool, and the pool rises to 15%

Full-price customers now visibly fund the half-price ones. The pool
gains a second draw line, the revenue forgone to the 50% code, beside
free-tier cost and house accounts, and the fraction rises from 10% to
15% because the free tier alone no longer explains it. At 15% in steady
state, discounted customers can be about a quarter of the paying base
with headroom left over; the top-up bridges the rest.

The budget gates the free tier only. An unconditional promise that
stops being honoured when a budget runs out was never unconditional,
and the person refused cannot see why, so a pool going negative on
discount draw is a signal to raise the top-up rather than a reason to
turn anyone away.

Two caveats are published with the number, because the books are the
whole point. A discounted customer is individually profitable, so the
discount is not a loss being covered. And the subsidy claim is only
literally true for someone who would otherwise have paid full price,
which we cannot distinguish and is exactly why the offer works without
asking. So the published claim is what we gave away, never a claim
about who paid for whom.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>