max1990

Completely agree. A manual sales process is a huge friction (per the CEO's comment above it takes more than 50% of startups over a week to buy tldraw!). And no visibility into scale pricing is a risk no company should take.

It's a great product - charge for it for sure - you need to be comercially viable. BUT, imho it's madness to make it so difficult to buy and have opaque pricing. It's a path to stagnant reliance on a handful of big customers while somebody innovates from under you and takes the market. Comfortable for a while, and then no business.

I agree $6k upfront for startups is a lot (especially if they're just riffing).

But the bigger issue is there's no clarity of what this will cost if the startup works out and grows. So you spend a bunch of dev time building something that uses TLdraw and then its completely unknown if you can keep using it in the future as the cost could be $1 or $1 billion.

Any startup would be crazy to depend on a service with unknown pricing.

Sure you can email them and get the pitch by a salesperson, and use a bunch of time to get some long legal agreement with pricing in it somewhere, but that's what you do for massive custom-built enterprise tools. Not for on SDK in your stack. I don't think the opaque pricing model is common or viable for this kind of SDK. Imagine if payments providers or authorization providers or hosting all just had blank pricing and a "talk to us" button.

What will the cost be? I see it's $6,000 for a 10-person startup, but assuming a startup reaches scale, there's no information about what this will cost. Would be unwise to use this SDK as an integral feature without any kind of clarity on pricing. Some guidance would be helpful without needing to start setting up official calls with salespeople and going through some long discussion. Often, those sales pipelines don't even give pricing because the salesperson decides that the startup is not a good prospect. And thus back to the catch-22: we can't know the pricing until we're big.