---
title: "Neeto Pricing Philosophy"
description: "Read about Neeto's approach to software pricing."
canonical_url: "https://www.neeto.com/pricing-philosophy"
markdown_url: "https://www.neeto.com/pricing-philosophy.md"
---

# Neeto Pricing Philosophy

Read about Neeto's approach to software pricing.

Hey there!

Let's talk about something that's been on my mind lately - software pricing.
It's getting out of hand, isn't it? I mean, you start with a free plan, but
before you know it, you're being nudged to upgrade to a paid tier. And suddenly,
you're shelling out way more than you'd planned.

### Commodity software, luxury prices

Look, I get it. If the software is super complex, a high price makes sense. But
here's what doesn't sit right with me: even when there is a sea of competitors
offering similar features, the prices don't budge.

Take scheduling software, for example. When I launched
[NeetoCal](https://neeto.com/neetocal), there were already 30 competitors out
there. Thirty! That's a crowded market; by definition, it's a commodity, and
you'd think the prices would be low. But no - what we're seeing instead is
luxury pricing.

This is where [Neeto](https://neeto.com) comes in. At Neeto, we're competing on
price.

### Growing Neeto the organic way

Let's be real — getting new customers is no joke. Most companies have marketing
budgets for running ads on Google, LinkedIn, and similar sites. The playbook is
simple: take the money earned from customers, give a chunk of it to companies
like Google, and bring in new customers through ads.

I've got two problems with that. First, handing over money to a trillion-dollar
company never felt right. Second, I'm terrible at it. I don't have the energy to
keep up with monitoring keyword performance across multiple platforms week after
week. It's just exhausting.

So, we took a different route. At Neeto, we're skipping the middleman and
letting our customers spread the word for us. How? By offering affordable
prices, we make it easy for our customers to continue using Neeto products.

Every time someone shares a booking link, they're promoting
[NeetoCal](https://neeto.com/neetocal). When someone shares a NeetoRecord video,
they're promoting [NeetoRecord](https://neeto.com/neetorecord). It's organic,
and it works.

It's a win-win - affordable prices for our customers and organic growth for us.

### Building Neeto with two-person team

We're building around 20 products at once. Each product got two engineers. Just
two. (Okay, sometimes three if we're feeling fancy.)

Why not add more engineers and go faster? Because more people = more meetings =
more coordination = more overhead. Our engineers don't just code - they plan
features, write docs, provide support and even talk to customers.

This lean approach isn't just about simplicity - it's about cost. Smaller teams
have less overhead. They need less meetings and less things get lost in
translation. Smaller teams also have greater sense of achievement upon shipping
a new feature. They have greater sense of pride when our customers appreciate
our work.

### The sustainability question

As I said Neeto is competing on price. Our pricing is so competitive that people
ask, "Is Neeto sustainable?"

The short answer is: not yet. Neeto doesn't make enough money to stand on its
own today. Neeto is backed by [BigBinary](https://bigbinary.com), a Ruby on
Rails consulting company I started over 14 years ago. If I look at BigBinary and
Neeto combined then today we are profitable. BigBinary is not only supporting
Neeto but is playing a crucial role in ensuring Neeto products are affordable.
How? Let's take a look.

A few years ago, I decided to bring fresh talent into the mix by hiring new
graduates (we call them "freshers" in India) from various colleges and training
them in Ruby on Rails through our in-house
[BigBinary Academy](https://bigbinaryacademy.com) program. The "BigBinary
orientation" is a six months program.

A question that bothered me was, "What these freshers will do after the
training." Typically, most consulting companies put these freshers on the client
project as "junior engineers," and they bill a lower rate for these junior
engineers. BigBinary has a reputation for delivering quality work, and putting
freshers on the client project would dilute the brand. I needed to find a
different solution.

The obvious solution was to give these freshers some dummy projects to work on
so that they could get some hands-on experience. From my personal experience,
working on dummy projects does not bring seriousness, and it's not fun. I wanted
these freshers to work on real projects. They should see errors. They should be
hunting for transaction ID in logs. They should be trying to see why the
application keeps crashing for a particular customer who has grammarly extension
installed. They should get support questions from our customers. To solve this
problem, I decided to build Neeto.

These freshers will work on Neeto and learn Ruby on Rails, React, and SQL in the
real world. I pulled eight senior engineers from consulting work and made them
"tech leads" in Neeto. And the work in Neeto began.

Now, the issue was who would be the "product manager." What features should they
develop? What products to build? We were using Calendly and Loom, so we started
working on [NeetoCal](https://neeto.com/neetocal) and
[NeetoRecord](https://neeto.com/neetorecord). We have seen our customers use
Zendesk and Intercom, so we started working on
[NeetoDesk](https://neeto.com/neetodesk),
[NeetoChat](https://neeto.com/neetochat) and
[NeetoKB](https://neeto.com/neetokb).

We used Balsamiq, so we started building
[NeetoWireframe](https://neeto.com/wireframe). We had seen our clients use JIRA
and Asana, so we started building
[NeetoPlanner](https://neeto.com/neetoplanner).

We didn't want to increase our cost by hiring tons of "product managers," so we
let our engineers be the PMs. As I mentioned earlier, we assigned two engineers
to each product.

These engineers would examine the competitive landscape, decide on the main
feature to build, and then go and build it.

## Let's talk numbers

So BigBinary hired a bunch of freshers, trained them for six months and let them
work on Neeto. How BigBinary is benefitting from this endeavor? Good questions.
Let's talk numbers.

When I hire freshers, I typically offer around 25,000 USD as the salary in
India. For their first six months of employment, they are in the "orientation"
phase, where they learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React.js and Ruby on Rails from
BigBinary Academy.

After six months, they will join the Neeto engineering team, where they will
work for 18 months. They have now spent a total of two years in the company, and
the total cost of their time in the company is around $50K.

I believe in these two years, these freshers gain experience equivalent to four
years of work experience in other companies. Now, I'll try to put these freshers
into client projects.

To keep Math simple, let's assume that the salary is the same: $25k. At the end
of the third year, the total cost to the company would be around $75K. If I want
to recover the full $75K in one year of client work, then let's see what my
billing rate needs to be.

Let's assume that the fresher will work 46 weeks out of 52. Each week is 40
hours. So the total working hours in a year are 46 \* 40 = 1840 hours.

Now, let's divide 75,000 by the number of hours. 75000/1840 = 40.7

So, if I bill the fresher for the whole third year at $40/hr, the fresher would
have paid for their costs at the end of the third year. In this Math, the
BigBinary has not made any profit. However, the 18 months of work in Neeto
didn't cost Neeto anything. The whole 18 months of work were a surplus.

Now, let's look at the fourth year. If I can put the fresher in a client project
in the fourth year at the same billing rate of $40/hr, then BigBinary will make
some profit in the fourth year.

I've kept math simple by keeping the salary at $25K. The salary goes up yearly,
but you get the idea.

Most consulting companies that dabble into products leave the consulting behind
if they succeed in the product. Not me. First of all, BigBinary has been doing
consulting for over 14 years, and we are good at it. Second, BigBinary and Neeto
have a very symbiotic relationship. They help each other.

When engineers have worked on Neeto for two years, we know very well what they
are good at and which areas they need to improve upon. This means BigBinary gets
thoroughly vetted engineers for client work.

Neeto benefits from BigBinary's financial support. It provides room for Neeto to
grow and develop a good product market fit before It can stand on its own.

This is how I've been running both BigBinary and Neeto. In the beginning, I
mentioned that Neeto is currently not profitable on its own. Still, if you look
at BigBinary and Neeto combined, the joint entity is profitable since BigBinary
Consulting is making enough money to pay for Neeto's work.

Since I shared all this information online, I received some comments about why
I'm sharing my secret recipe. Well, first of all, there is nothing secret about
it. Secondly, focus is everything.

Building a consulting company is challenging. Building a product company is
challenging. Build a product company that is building 20+ products is
challenging. Building 20+ products and running a consulting company is even more
challenging. Doing all this without any VC funding is challenging. It requires a
focus and discipline. There is no secret recipe here. Anyone who can focus for a long term
can do this.

## Competing on price

Business books love to say, "Don't compete on price." But isn't competing on
price the essence of capitalism?

I agree that competing on price is not for everyone. If I had brilliant new
ideas to bring to the world, I would also create innovative products. However,
my strength is not bringing new ideas but implementing the ideas already out
there in a cost-efficient manner.

## Race to the bottom

Some call competing on price "race to the bottom". I see it differently. I see
it as "race to bring technology to people left behind".

We launched NeetoCal and I must have spoken to hundreds of our customers. Many
of them had tried out existing solutions in the market. For many their monthly
usage was so low that the cost was not justified. Because Neeto is competing on
price, these folks who had left technology are now able to use technology to
enhance their daily life.

I was born in India. Many folks who use Neeto products do not have the ability
to pay for the cost of our competitor's products. I definitely see building
Neeto as the "race to bring technology to people left behind".

## Closing thoughts

Neeto is an experiment on many fronts. It's an experiment on building 20
products at once. It's an experiment on building products with freshers with no
experience of building products. It's an experiment on building products without
"product managers". It's an experiment on mixing consulting with products. It's
an experiment on building products without any marketing team, without any SEO
and without any external VC funding.

Will this experiment work out? Only time will tell.

We publish
[product metrics](https://neeto.com/neeto/blog/neeto-product-metrics-for-january-2025)
every month. To see how we are doing, subscribe to the Neeto blog.

I hope you enjoy using Neeto products, and if you have any questions, feel free
to reach out to me at [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/neerajsingh0101/)
or [Twitter](https://x.com/neerajsingh0101).

## Links

- [Human page](https://www.neeto.com/pricing-philosophy)