Flat Rate Pricing For The Win

If you're building software in 2026, there's a decent chance you've accepted one universal truth:

"We'll figure out the cloud bill later."

A recent AWS release temporarily caused wildly inaccurate pricing information to appear, leading to lots of screaming and hair pulling for developers who already spend enough time wondering whether every API call is secretly costing them another nickel. Read more at Wired if you've been hiding under a rock. Don't get me wrong - I love cloud infrastructure. It's hard to beat the convenience. But usage-based pricing has always felt like ordering dinner from a menu with no prices.

The Meter Is Always Running

Consumption pricing makes sense in plenty of situations. Massive workloads? Enterprise scale? Sure. But for a lot of SaaS products? It creates unnecessary anxiety. As developers, we already have enough things keeping us awake at 2 AM. Pricing models shouldn't be one of them.

Why We Went Flat Rate

When we built FeatureFlags.app, we made a conscious decision to keep pricing boring. One predictable monthly price. No calculators. No surprise invoices. No "Congratulations! Your product became successful, so your bill tripled."

Flat-rate pricing isn't just easier for customers, it's easier for everyone. Support conversations are simpler. Customers know what they're paying. Nobody needs a spreadsheet just to understand an invoice. It's almost like software should reduce complexity.

Final Thoughts

AWS will fix bugs. That's what engineering teams do. But the incident is a good reminder that complicated pricing models have real consequences when something goes sideways. We'll happily keep pricing as simple as possible.

Our customers have enough surprises in production. Their invoice shouldn't be one of them.