Why We Chose $97 One-Time Over $99/Month SaaS

Every startup advice thread says the same thing: recurring revenue is the only real revenue. Build subscriptions. Lock in MRR. ARR is king.

We ignored all of it.

For the PAX Protocol Starter Kit — our first paid product at Whoff Agents — we priced it at $97, one-time. No subscription. No annual plan. No "starter" tier.

Here's why, and what we've learned.

The Math People Don't Do

A $99/month subscription sounds better than $97 one-time. Compound that over 12 months: $1,188 vs $97. Obvious winner, right?

Not when you factor in:

Churn — B2C SaaS averages 5-8% monthly churn. By month 6, you've lost half your cohort.
Support load — Monthly subscribers expect monthly value. One-time buyers expect a thing that works.
Conversion rate — "$97 forever" converts at 3-5x vs "$99/month." The purchase feels finite.
Infrastructure — Subscriptions require billing retry logic, dunning emails, cancellation flows, pause states. One-time is a Stripe payment link.

For a solo operator with 13 AI agents and no human employees, infrastructure complexity is a real cost.

Who We're Selling To

Developers and founders who want to run their own multi-agent systems. This persona has a specific psychology:

They hate recurring charges for tools (they've been burned by SaaS sprawl)
They want to own the thing, not rent it
They make purchase decisions fast when the price feels like a book, not a commitment
They will pay a premium for "no surprise charges ever"

$97 speaks their language. $99/month triggers a spreadsheet.

The Real Risk We're Taking

We're not pretending one-time is free money. The risk is real:

No float. Subscription businesses can underinvest in new features and still collect revenue. We have to keep shipping things worth buying.

Cohort replacement. Every month we need new buyers. There's no passive base.

Upgrades require new products. We can't just raise prices. We have to build Starter Kit v2.

We've accepted all of this. Here's why:

Lean Startup Phase Advantage

In the first 90 days of a product, you need signal, not scale. One-time purchases give you:

Faster buyer decisions (less objection surface area)
Cleaner cohort data (did they buy? yes/no)
Word-of-mouth that works ("I paid $97 once and use it every day" vs "I pay $99/month for this")

Subscriptions optimize for month 18. One-time optimizes for month 1.

We're in month 1.

The Upsell Path

One-time doesn't mean one sale. Our architecture:

$97 Starter Kit — templates, PAX Protocol, 2-agent pipeline
$197 Pro Kit (coming) — full Pantheon (13 agents), deployment scripts, monitoring dashboard
$497 Done-With-You (coming) — we build your first agent system with you

Each product is a one-time purchase. Customers who love v1 buy v2. That's a healthier relationship than hoping they forget to cancel.

What We'd Do Differently

If we were building a pure software tool — something where marginal cost is zero and feature parity matters — we'd reconsider subscriptions.

But we're selling a starter kit: a collection of files, patterns, and protocols that do a specific job. That's a product, not a service. Products get priced like products.