For 15 years, consumer software meant free with ads or maybe $20 a month. That was the ceiling. Everyone knew consumers wouldn’t pay more.
But look at what’s happening right now. Perplexity Max costs $200 monthly. Claude Max hits the same price point. ChatGPT Pro, Gemini Ultra, Grok Heavy — all clustering around this new $200 tier. Early adopters are happily paying 10x the old ceiling.
Here’s what’s interesting: these look like horizontal products for everyone. But their hyper-premium tiers tell a different story. The people paying $200 for Claude aren’t casual users — they’re developers building and debugging complex apps. Gemini Ultra users aren’t googling movie times — they’re creatives generating hundreds of Veo 3 videos and stitching them together into micro-films.
These are narrow apps hiding inside broader platforms. The free tier is the funnel. The $200 tier is the real product.
Why does this work? Because these hyper-premium SKUs aren’t mass market products, they’re 100x leaps for specific consumers in a way that wasn’t previously possible. Can you imagine being an engineer that’s not using Cursor in 2025? There is no going back.
The math is compelling. Traditional ad-supported apps need hundreds of millions of users to build real businesses. But at $200 per month, you only need 41,000 customers to build a $100 million RR company. That’s a thriving Discord server, not a global phenomenon. And the unit economics should be better, since tailored products lend themselves to word-of-mouth growth within niche communities.
This changes everything about building consumer software. No more growth at all costs. No more engagement hacking. No more selling your users’ attention to advertisers. Just go insanely deep on something a very specific group of people loves or needs, and charge accordingly.
This should also be a much more satisfying experience for builders. The winners will go the deepest on product instead of being the best at growth marketing. In an era of abundance, specificity wins.
My prediction is that the mass market consumer startup will be increasingly rare. The future belongs to Narrow Startups that go deep, not wide. And, what the smartest apps charge today is what every valuable app will charge in three years.
