Pricing Manifesto

Sunsama costs $20/user/month when paid monthly and $192/user/year when paid annually. We're often asked why our pricing is different from other productivity tools.

Here's what motivates our decision:

Price should be determined by value created

It's easy to justify paying for things you love. When you get a lot of value out of a service, it feels fair to pay a high price for it.

Since Sunsama is (hopefully) something that you love using every single day you're at work to feel calm and effective, we chose a price of $1/workday for the daily value of the service.

Free forever plans create bad incentives, and aren't sustainable

Sunsama doesn't have a free forever plan and doesn't plan to. Free plans create bad incentives that hurt our users.

Digital products that don't charge money, or don't charge enough, end up selling customer data or shutting down. Neither of those outcomes is acceptable to us.

When a users pays a significant amount for Sunsama, they are sending a strong signal that we've created something of significant value for them. This signal drives our product development process. We build and improve Sunsama for our paying customers, first and foremost.

On the other hand, users on a free forever plan can be the most fickle while getting the least value from the product. Their requests can dilute a product which ultimately hurts the people who use it the most.

Higher prices create higher expectations, which creates a higher quality product

Sunsama's price creates high expectations from customers and in aspiring to meet those expectations we are held accountable and deliver a high quality product.

Priced for sustainability, not for future salvation

Sunsama is priced so that we can be profitable and sustainable now. This is good for us and even better for our customers who depend on the product every day - count on us being around for a long time.

We've seen too many productivity products fail because they fail to make money even though they grew their free user base fast. We think building a business that grows quickly, in hopes of future salvation from venture capitalist or an acquisition creates bad incentives for us and a sub-par product for our customers.

No psychological trickery

Sunsama is priced in whole numbers (USD).

We know that more people would convert to a paid plan if we'd price the product at $19.99 instead of $20.00 but that's just deceitful psychological trickery. Just like our core product, we're interested in building a product that fights back against our psychological weaknesses instead of taking advantage of them.

No lifetime deals

Sunsama charges a subscription instead of a one time fee because it keeps customers committed to our product and us committed to maintaining it.

If we sold Sunsama as a "lifetime deal", we'd have no incentive to improve the product, or even make it very good. Our only incentive would be to convince people to buy it and move on. We only want to make our money from people who love using the product everyday.

Discounts for commitment

Sunsama gives you 20% off if you commit to paying for the year up front.

Long term committed customers enable us to sink our teeth into improving the product in meaningful ways instead of chasing new marketing fads. Our annual plan is our way of thanking you for that.

Fall in love, then pay

Sunsama doesn't ask for your credit card until your trial is over and you are sure you want to keep going.

It's wrong to build to a business off of people's forgetfulness. You should give us your money only after you've fallen in love with Sunsama as your daily planner.

No fake sales

Sunsama is always worth the same amount. We don't do special deals for Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

We think our product provides the same value the whole year round and that customers should not be penalized (or rewarded) because of when they found out about Sunsama and decided to pay.

Cancellation should be easy

Sunsama lets you cancel without going through support or dozens of screens. When you cancel we'll only ask you why and then immediately provide a button to cancel your subscription.