In photography, shooting wide open means opening the aperture right up and letting all the light in. That seems like the right way to talk about pricing, too — it's the conversation software companies usually have behind closed doors, and I'd rather have it out here.
Cullibrate's founding plan costs $29/year. What it costs after that, I honestly don't know yet. That's not a teaser — it's the truthful state of things, and the reasons are worth explaining.
What software pricing normally pays for
When you subscribe to most software, you're not just paying for the software. You're paying for the organisation that makes it — salaries, offices, marketing departments, management, the works. Nothing wrong with that; it's what building software at quality has historically required, and plenty of good tools have been built that way.
What's changed
I build Cullibrate alone, with serious help from AI tooling — what's come to be called agentic engineering. I want to be careful with this claim, because it gets overcooked: it hasn't made the work easy, and it took everything I've learned across a software career to get this product to where it is. But the structural fact is real. One engineer can now build, support, and run software that would have taken a team not long ago. Cullibrate is that in practice — the app, the website, the support system, the release pipeline: one person's shop.
What I want to do about it
Pass it on. When the structure of making software gets fundamentally cheaper, I think the price should follow. Not because charging more is wrong, but because the point of the exercise — for me — is bringing genuinely high-quality tools to people at prices that reflect what software costs to make now, rather than what it used to cost.
The honest part
So the long-term price isn't locked down. Maybe $29 a year turns out to be simply the price. Maybe it lands somewhere else. I do need the business to pay its way — a tool you rely on needs to reliably exist, and that means sustainable, not charitable. What I can tell you today is the founding deal is $29 ongoing, everything included, and the direction of travel is affordability.
A changing world, this one, and mostly for the better. Worth letting the light in.