Look at the pricing page of any major Discord bot. You'll see four tiers. Free, Premium, Pro, and "Custom / Contact Us". Each tier adds a handful of features and raises limits. The best features live in Pro or Custom. You're expected to start at Premium and upsell yourself up the ladder.
This is a ladder because ladders convert. Every rung adds one or two must-have features and most customers can't resist climbing. It works well for the bot company. It works badly for the customer, who ends up paying $30/mo for features they use once a month and still hits a cap on the ones they use daily.
We rejected the ladder. Kovra has one paid tier.
What one tier looks like
Premium is $5.99/mo, $59/yr, or $99 lifetime. All three get the same 15 gates. There is no Pro tier above Premium. There is no "Business" or "Enterprise." Agency is an add-on, not a higher tier — it strips branding for client servers and sits on top of any Premium sub.
The 15 gates are:
- Kovra Custom — rename the bot, change its avatar, pick an accent colour.
- Social alerts — YouTube, Twitch, Bluesky, Kick, RSS, Podcast.
- Invite tracker — leaderboard with fake/left attribution.
- Retention curve — 1d/7d/30d/90d cohort retention analytics.
- Config import/export — clone your setup across servers.
- Caps lifted — custom commands (20 → ∞), auto-responders (5 → ∞), scheduled messages (3 → ∞), voice hubs (1 → 5), role rewards (15 → ∞), active giveaways (1 → ∞).
- Deeper retention — cases 7d → 30d, full retention analytics.
- Better tickets — HTML transcripts replace plaintext.
Why this works for us
A simple pricing page is a marketing advantage. A customer who lands on our pricing page spends 30 seconds deciding vs. five minutes comparing tier tables. Every pricing study we ran showed simpler = higher conversion, because choice fatigue is real.
A simple gate matrix is an engineering advantage. Every feature has the same boolean check: guildHasPremium(guildId). No "is this a Pro feature or a Business feature" tier-checking logic scattered across the codebase. Adding a new feature takes one line of gate check, not a spreadsheet of "which tier gets this."
When we'd add a tier
We won't add a higher tier for these reasons:
- "We ran out of features to add to Premium." This is never true.
- "Some customers will pay more." Probably, but that's their problem, not ours.
- "Our competitors have four tiers." Not a reason.
We'd add a tier for these reasons:
- Volume workloads that cost real money. If a server has 500 000+ members and is hammering our infra, we'll eventually need a custom tier that covers the hosting cost. But we'll negotiate it per-customer, not via a self-serve Pro tier.
- White-label reselling. Agencies running Kovra for dozens of clients may want a reseller arrangement with bulk discounts + support SLAs. We'll build that as a partnership program, not as a ladder rung.
Feedback we get
Two kinds of customer push back on this pricing. The first says "$5.99 is too cheap — you'll never make money." We appreciate the concern. The math works out because we keep engineering lean and don't carry sales staff.
The second says "I only want one feature — can I get a cheaper plan?" The answer is no. We'd rather lose the $3/mo customer than build a second cheaper tier and complicate the gate matrix. The free tier is genuinely useful; if it's not enough, $5.99 is the price of the whole stack.
One tier, all features, cancel any time. That's the deal.