Pricing, and how we think about it

There are three companies whose pricing we've studied closely - Basecamp, Plausible, and Superhuman. They're very different products for very different audiences, but they share a posture we wanted for Pixelmatic: price with generosity, compete on product, treat customers like adults.

Pricing can be designed as a maze or as a handshake. Mazes nickel-and-dime at every turn, hide essential features behind enterprise calls, and punish teams for growing. A handshake says: here's the price, here's what you get, and it's the kind of deal you'd happily recommend to a friend. We're trying to write the handshake version.

A few things we're starting with that we think of as small acts of generosity:

Record unlimited videos, for free, no account. The recorder is the hook. It's beautiful, browser-based, no install. Save as many WebM files as you want, locally. We're not putting a five-minute cap on the front door - just a discreet "Made with pixelmatic.co" in the bottom-right corner.
Three free published videos. Enough to actually try the hosted-video path end-to-end - public share link, transcript, the whole flow - before we ask for a dollar.
Centralised recorder settings on every paid plan. Camera position, frame backgrounds, branding - configured once, consistent across everyone on your team. This is one of the things we're proudest of, and it's on every paid tier.
Branded public video pages on every paid plan. Your videos look like yours, not ours, from the cheapest plan up.
Pay by tier, not by seat. Each plan covers a generous band of users, so you can add teammates within your tier without watching the meter. A five-person team on Short pays $29 a month total - not $29 × 5 - and you only move up when your team actually outgrows the band.
Your videos stay. No retention clocks, no "we archived your stuff after six months." You have them until you delete them.

We also wanted to be honest about something. We need to make money. Pixelmatic has real infrastructure behind it - encoding, hosting, delivery - and generosity that's financially unsustainable is just a countdown. So the pricing ladder exists, and it's shaped around usage: how many videos you publish, how much storage you use, how big your team is. You climb the ladder because you do more, not because we held a feature hostage.

Two features are genuinely gated, and we want to say so plainly. Advanced analytics (viewer-level engagement, retention curves) and custom video domains live on our higher tiers because they cost us more to run or they're the kind of thing buyers at that scale expect to be differentiated. Everything else - transcription, branded share pages, password-protected links, team settings - is included on every paid plan.

That's the whole thing. No seat counts masquerading as value. No "contact us for pricing." Plans start at $12 a month. Record for free for as long as you like. If you find us useful, we hope you'll tell someone.

Wouter
Founder