Founding-member economics: what $29 buys today, honestly
Most pricing pages sell you the roadmap and call it the product. Ours says “10 of 57 tools live” in plain text. Here is what AEQUARA Pro actually is right now — and why we price the truth.
Yesterday we turned on self-serve checkout for AEQUARA Pro — $29 a month or $249 a year, live on the pricing page. The normal move at this point is a launch post about how much value is inside. We’d rather do the unusual thing and tell you exactly what you’re buying, including the parts that aren’t finished — because a company whose entire premise is calibrated truth doesn’t get to exempt its own pricing page.
What Pro is today
Today, Pro is a founding membership in an early product. The consumer catalog stands at 10 live tools of a planned 57 — all ten free to try at /tools-v2, no account needed, so you can judge the quality before paying anything. What Pro adds on top is early and concrete: exports and history ship to founding members first, and Pro members get priority on the “ship next” queue — a real vote on which of the remaining tools we build sooner. You’re also locking in the founding rate, and the exit is frictionless by design: cancel anytime through the Stripe billing portal, no email to support, no retention flow.
What Pro is not, yet
Equally concrete. Most of the 57-tool catalog is still being built — 10 live means 47 not live, and we’d rather you read that number here than discover it after paying. Pay-per-report at $4.99, for people who want one deep report without a subscription, is still launching: the checkout for it is not live yet, and until it is, we won’t pretend otherwise. And Pro does not buy priority access to human professionals, legal advice, or any guarantee about outcomes — the tools brief you for high-stakes moments; they don’t replace the licensed people some of those moments require.
Why price an unfinished product at all?
A fair question with a plain answer: because early revenue from people who knowingly bought an early product is the honest way to fund the rest of the catalog. The alternative funding models all tax you less visibly — advertising sells your attention, data-selling sells your information, and “free forever” usually means the product is aimed at someone other than you. Founding members pay a little, early, knowing what’s live, and in exchange get the founding rate, first access as features land, and disproportionate influence over the build order. Both sides of that trade can see exactly what they’re getting. That’s the kind of deal we want to be in.
Why we say so on the pricing page
The deeper reason for all this candor is selfish: trust is our product. The AI Trust Index publishes our errors; the proof record is built to be recomputed rather than believed; and a pricing page that oversold would quietly contradict every one of those signals. So the pricing page says what this post says — what’s live, what’s next, what isn’t buyable yet. If that costs us a few impulse subscriptions, it buys something worth more: subscribers who knew exactly what they were funding, and who stay because we keep telling them the truth.