Why Founding Members exist (and why only 1,000)

The Founding Members program isn’t a promo. It’s a concrete deal, with squared numbers, and with reasons I owe you if you’re going to put down your card.

The offer: the first 1,000 users who convert to a paid plan get Plus at €9.99/mo locked-in for life. It’s not €9.99 the first year. It’s €9.99 as long as you don’t cancel, no matter how the public pricing evolves (which is already €13.99 today and will go up).

The first reasonable question is: why am I doing this? Short answer: because I need 1,000 paying users to validate that this solves a real problem. Long answer: because the founding use case of Memchats (managing toxic communication with an ex) isn’t something you discover in an onboarding funnel. I need people who’ll use it for 6, 12, 24 months. And for them to stay, they need to trust that I won’t squeeze them with annual price hikes.

The second question: why exactly 1,000? Runway math. Memchats operates with real costs: GPU for self-hosted embeddings, Claude calls, Hetzner infrastructure, self-hosted Mailcow, my own time. With 1,000 users at €9.99/mo, recurring revenue is €120K/yr. That covers critical operations and leaves margin to build the rest. More Founding Members would mean less margin to scale the product. Fewer would mean not hitting self-sustaining runway.

The third: is this a "limited time" trick? No. The promo closes when the cap fills, not when a timer expires. If it takes 6 months to fill, it closes in 6 months. If 6 weeks, 6 weeks. No fake countdown timer, no "12 slots left" without verification. The pricing page shows live remaining Founding slots, read from the database.

The fourth: what if I cancel and come back? You lose the Founding price. Non-transferable. If you leave, you lose your slot, and the slot doesn’t reopen : it’s burned, keeping the cap at 1,000.

The fifth: why locked-in for life? Because trust isn’t built with first-year discounts. If I sell you "first year at €9.99 and then we’ll see", I’m creating anxiety. If I tell you "€9.99 as long as you’re a user, written in my terms", I’m creating a commitment.

And the sixth, which nobody asks but is important: is it sustainable? Yes. Memchats Pro is €22.99/mo and the costs of serving a Plus user are a fraction of that. 1,000 Founding at €9.99 is an acceptable opportunity cost : not a hole. In return I get the most important thing for a startup: 1,000 users with material reasons to stay and to speak well of the product.

If you fit, this is the moment. If not, that’s also fine : Plus at €13.99/mo is still a good deal compared to any real alternative on the market.