Spoiler: my opinion is yes, but it is nuanced.

I feel fairly confident saying I think we've all being there at some point. Seeing an item, be it a physical good like a handbag, a phone or a shoe. Or even a digital good like an editing software, a streaming service or even just a game. We look down at the price and think: "I'd really love to have this, but only a fool would pay this much for it." Now that is a feeling, dare I say a mere opinion but certainly not a argument.

And feelings about money is specifically what I'll try to leave aside in this exploration, and focus as much as possible on hard facts.

It would come as no surprise to you that I as a CS (Computer Science) student, don't know that much about what goes into designing, manufacturing and selling physical products like a bag or a shoe, so I can't really weigh in on the costs that go into making physical products. I'll focus more on digital products, specifically Software as a Service (SaaS) products, and the economics of running a software business because not only is that what I studied, that's also what I literally do for a living. I build software, and I now run my own SaaS (Underleau). So I have some insight into the costs that go into running a software business, and how those costs relate to pricing.

The Case Against: When Prices Feel Like a Grab

Let us start with the ugly side, because it is the side most of us know best.

There is a particular flavour of betrayal that comes from opening a piece of software you have used for years, only to discover that the features you relied on have been locked behind a new, more expensive tier. The features were already built. They cost nothing new to maintain. The only change was a line in a database that swapped "included" to "premium." This is not value-based pricing; it is rent extraction.

Adobe is the canonical example here. The shift from Creative Suite (buy once, own forever) to Creative Cloud (rent forever, never own) was not driven by a sudden surge in development cost. It was driven by the realisation that subscription models produce predictable, recurring revenue that Wall Street rewards handsomely. The software did not get ten times better in the transition from CS6 to the first Creative Cloud release. The billing model did. And the price went up — way up.

The same pattern repeats across the industry. Enterprise SaaS tools that charge per-seat, per-month, with a mandatory annual commitment and a hidden usage cap. Analytics platforms that show you a free dashboard and then charge per event once you are too integrated to leave. Note-taking apps that dangle cross-device sync as a premium feature — something that costs the company pennies in bandwidth but is presented as a luxury upgrade.

When a company charges twenty euros per month for a note-taking app that stores plain text files, the price is not a reflection of cost. It is a reflection of what the market will tolerate. And that, to me, feels unfair.

The Case For: When Great Products Are Suspiciously Cheap

But here is where the conversation gets interesting. If overpricing is unjust, then underpricing should be a virtue — right? Except it is not that simple.

Take Canva. Canva is, in my opinion, one of the most impressive software products of the last decade. It democratised graphic design. It put professional-quality templates, a massive asset library, and a genuinely usable editor into the hands of people who had never opened Photoshop. It is fast, well-designed, and genuinely delightful to use. And its free tier is almost absurdly generous.

Most users — millions of them — pay nothing. They get thousands of templates, millions of stock photos, and a capable editor at zero cost. Canva foots the bill for server infrastructure, bandwidth, content licensing, and engineering salaries for these users out of its own pocket, subsidised by the smaller percentage who pay for Canva Pro. That is a consumer-friendly decision, no question about it.

But is it fair to Canva?

Think about that for a moment. Canva employs thousands of people. It runs data centres on multiple continents. It negotiates licensing deals with Getty, Shutterstock, and independent creators. It builds AI features, collaborates with enterprise customers, and maintains a mobile app, a desktop app, and a web app simultaneously. And yet the vast majority of its user base generates zero revenue. The company is asking, in effect, "please pay us so we can keep the lights on for everyone," and most people say no.

I am not criticising Canva's strategy — it clearly works, and the company is valued at tens of billions. But the asymmetry is worth acknowledging. When a product is suspiciously cheap or free, someone is absorbing that cost. Usually it is investors (during growth phases) or paying customers (who cross-subsidise the free users). If the investors eventually want their money back — and they always do — the price will rise, and the free tier will shrink. That is not malice; it is mathematics.

So when we talk about fair pricing, we have to ask: fair to whom? The consumer who wants everything for nothing? Or the builder who needs to eat?

The Taxes Nobody Sees

This brings me to a factor that almost never enters the public conversation about pricing: where the company is based.

Underleau is based in Germany. Germany has one of the highest combined corporate tax burdens in Europe. The headline corporate income tax rate is 15%, but that is only the beginning. Add the solidarity surcharge (5.5% of the corporate tax) and the municipal trade tax (Gewerbesteuer, which varies by city but averages around 14%), and the effective tax rate on profits lands at approximately 30% — one of the highest in the OECD.

To put that in perspective: for every ten euros of profit Underleau generates, three go directly to the tax authority. Before we pay a single engineer, before we cover server costs, before we reinvest in the product — thirty percent is gone.

This is not a complaint. Germany offers excellent infrastructure, a highly educated workforce, robust legal protections, and one of the best social safety nets in the world. I am happy to contribute. But it is a material fact that shapes our pricing decisions, and I think consumers deserve to know about it. That five-euro subscription is not five euros of pocket money. After VAT (19%), platform commissions (15–30% depending on the store), and corporate taxes, what remains is a fraction of what the user sees.

I wish more companies were transparent about this. When you see a product priced at five euros per month, the question should not just be "is that worth it to me?" but also "is that enough to sustain the people building it?"

Underleau's Pricing: A Fair Shot at Fairness

So where does that leave us? Let me lay out Underleau's current pricing as transparently as I can.

Underleau is free to download and use forever. You can download the app right now, create a vault on your hard drive, write a million words, and never pay us a cent. No trial period. No feature gates on the core editor. No telemetry tracking your usage to justify an upsell later. Getting a subscription is entirely optional. Just like Canva, the free product is genuinely useful on its own.

Beyond that, we have three paid tiers for those who want or need more from their editor:

Pro (€5/month): Cross-device sync, cloud backup, 5 GB of media hosting, unlimited block layers, 30-day version history, and search across all documents.
Max (€10/month): Everything in Pro, plus 50 GB of media hosting, infinite version history with diffs, custom block types, a relationship graph view, and full-history search.
Teams (€15/month per member): Everything in Max, plus shared team vaults, collaborative workspaces, admin controls, and priority support.

These prices are not arbitrary. Here is what they need to cover:

Data hosting and bandwidth — every synced file and uploaded asset lives on a distributed storage network, and while we chose a provider with no egress fees, storage at scale is not free.
Database and authentication infrastructure — every authenticated session and database query carries an operational cost on the backend.
Payment processing fees — ~2.9% + a fixed fee per transaction, standard across the industry.
VAT (19%) — mandatory on digital goods sold in Germany and the EU.
German corporate tax (~30% of profit) — as discussed above.
Payroll — the engineers, designers, and support team who build and maintain the app.
Office and administrative costs — Rent, software licenses, accounting, legal, and other overhead.
Advertisement and marketing — to reach new users and grow the community.
Feature development — the features that do not exist yet but are in active development.
Contingency and reinvestment — to ensure the company can weather unexpected costs and continue to improve the product.

After all of that, the margin on an average €5-monthly subscriber is thankfully still healthy. That is helped by the fact that not every user costs us the same. Some users are power users and cost us more, while other other users might be more modest. But all of that is accounted for in the price, ie. Pricing 101. Modest users help average out the cost and keep us from falling in the red.

Could we charge more? Absolutely. There are writing tools that cost three times as much. But I personally do not believe that extracting maximum value from every single user is the same as building a sustainable business. I think there is a middle ground where the price reflects genuine cost plus a reasonable margin, the user feels they are getting good value, and the company can sleep at night.

It is important to note that things change, costs of operations evolve, often in unexpected ways. Things that held true today, might not hold true in 3 years or maybe just a few months. That is the reason why I can only hope none of you reading this, take it as a pledge to keep the above stated prices. Those prices aren't set in stone and are and unfortunately probably would be subject to change as Underleau grows.

What I can garantee in contrast is that Underleau will always be free to download and use forever with all its core feautures free to access. Underleau will never be a paid-only Software.

If prices ever are to change, I will write a blog post here at least 3 months ahead of time informing all users of the change in pricing and paid users will of course receive additional emails months ahead about the change, so they have enough time to adjust.

My Final Thoughts

After all of this, I keep coming back to the same thought: fairness in pricing is not really about the number. It is about the relationship.

When Adobe charges €60/month for a suite of tools that costs them marginally more to serve than it did ten years ago, that relationship feels exploitative. When Canva offers a stunning product for free and asks nothing in return, that relationship feels generous — but also precarious, because we know it cannot last forever without someone paying.

When a small, bootstrapped, local-first app like Underleau charges €5/month for cloud sync that costs real money to operate, the relationship is different. It is transparent. The user can see exactly what they are paying for, and they can stop paying at any time without losing access to their own files — because the files were always theirs, stored on their own disk.

That, to me, is the closest thing to fair pricing I have found. Not a discount. Not a loss leader. Not a bait-and-switch. Just an honest price for an honest service, with no lock-in, no hidden terms, and no telemetry watching you decide whether to upgrade.

You might still look at €5/month and decide it is not worth it. That is fine. The free tier will always be here, and your words will always belong to you. That is the point.

Pricing will never be perfectly fair for everyone. But it can be transparent. And transparency is the next best thing.