I made a funny discovery this week while reviewing my revenue sources: super cheap B2B products are not profitable. At least not in the way people usually imagine.
One of my tools costs $1 per month.
On paper, that sounds fine. In reality, it looks more like this.
Hosting costs are basically nothing. Stripe takes around $0.50 in minimal fees. I split whatever is left 50/50 with my buddy. Then taxes come in and do their thing. You can probably see where this is going.
Financially, it’s not great.
And yet, I keep doing it.
The project started as a side thing we built for ourselves first — a dirt-cheap feedback widget I use on all my projects. No dashboard, no complexity. It just emails feedback directly to you. I don’t even log into the app most of the time, and that’s honestly the best part.
Turns out other people wanted the exact same thing.
After about a month, we’ve got a dozen active users and around 70 feedback messages collected through it. I didn’t expect it to take off at all, let alone this quickly.
Whenever I talk about it, people say the same thing: “Just raise the price.”
But that misses the point.
The entire idea is that it costs $1 a month. It’s literally called onedollarfeedback. Raising the price would remove what makes it fun and interesting in the first place. In a world full of $30/month “lite” plans, there’s something refreshing about a tool that costs almost nothing and just quietly does its job.
To make it at least somewhat sustainable, we did find one compromise: an annual plan. $10 per year — the classic “two months free” approach. That feels fair and still stays true to the spirit of the product.
What’s surprising is how much traction this tiny widget gets. Probably because it just works, and nobody feels like rebuilding something this simple themselves. Sometimes boring software wins.
Now we’re starting to think bigger. One idea is to make it open source and eventually launch a whole collection of “one-dollar” tools. The obvious question is what kind of support or business model would sit behind that.
Paid support? Sponsorships? Hosted versions? Not sure yet.
For now, I’m still loving this little side project more every week, even if it’s not killing it financially. There’s something deeply satisfying about shipping something simple, useful, and frictionless.
So I’m curious what others think.
Is pushing the annual plan the right move?
Does open sourcing it make sense?
And if you were improving this kind of tool, what would you add — knowing it should stay simple and cheap?