The honest case for a $19 audit tool.

The first question every B2B operator asks when they see a $19/month tool is: what's the catch. The default assumption is that the price is bait — there's an upsell, an integration paywall, a usage cap that triggers at audit number eleven, or a free tier engineered to be just unusable enough to convert. The defaults exist because they almost always are. So this is the document that says what Savy is, what $19 buys, and what it doesn't.

What $19 buys

Two hundred audits a month. Audit history dashboard. CSV export. Slack integration. Domain change tracking. Each audit returns the same 14-point Fortune-100 receipt the free tier returns — same engine, same scoring, same fields. There is no "Savy Pro" line item we kept off the free tier just to make $19 look generous. The $19 unlock is volume, history, and team integrations. That's the whole list.

Two things are not behind the $19 paywall, by design:

1. The full audit quality. The free tier's one-a-day audit is the same audit as the $19 tier's two-hundredth. Same model, same prompt, same receipt format. If we made the free tier worse to push upgrades, the free tier would stop working as marketing — and Savy is, fundamentally, a marketing wedge.
2. Watermarks. No "powered by" stamps the user can't remove on the free PDF. No "Savy Free" mark obscuring the score. The receipt prints clean.

Two things are behind the $19 paywall:

1. Real ICP fit scoring. Free tier returns a Company Profile (industry, size, stage, signals) — we describe the audited company. Paid tiers add an ICP fit score against the user's stored ICP definition. We can't score fit without knowing your ICP, and we won't fake it.
2. Audit history. Free tier audits delete after 24 hours. Paid tiers store indefinitely. This is a storage cost decision, not a value-engineering one — keeping every free user's audits forever is real Supabase cost we can't eat at $0/month.

What's behind the soft cap

The $19 tier has a 200/month soft cap. After 200, audits keep working — they just bill at $0.10 each on top of the base $19. We never block a paying customer mid-workflow. We surface the line item.

Why caps at all? Because the same audit engine serves everyone. One scripted user firing 100,000 audits a day exhausts the LLM quota for every other user on the platform. The cap is shared-infrastructure protection, not value engineering. If we built Savy on dedicated paid LLM lanes per user, the cap would be different (and the price would be different). It's not, so the cap is.

The pricing ladder, plainly

The $19 tier is intentionally cheap relative to the value of the audit. Most operators currently pay an agency $400 for a manual version of this audit — once. We do it 200 times a month for $19. The reason isn't generosity, it's positioning: Savy is a feeder. It exists to get B2B operators in the habit of running audits before they sequence. The handful who run audits enough to need the platform that does the sequencing become SalesDriver customers. That's the business model. Honest about it.

Why we'll never discount $19

Three reasons, ranked:

1. The price is the message

$19 communicates "this is utility, not enterprise." Discounting to $9 communicates "we're desperate." Promotions on the entry tier de-anchor the SalesDriver upgrade — if Savy is $9 today and the platform is $99, the upgrade is 11x. If Savy is $19 and the platform is $99, the upgrade is 5x and feels like graduating. The 5x feels right. We don't want to break it for short-term conversions.

2. Discounts attract the wrong tier

Customers who buy $19 because it was discounted to $14 churn at roughly twice the rate of customers who buy at full price. We've measured this on three other SD products. Discount-conditioned customers expect more discounts and feel cheated when they don't appear. Full-price customers internalize the price as the price.

3. Discounts make the SalesDriver upgrade feel like a punishment

If you're a $19 customer who paid $19 from day one, graduating to $99 SalesDriver Starter feels like a step up. If you paid $14 because of a launch promo, graduating feels like a 7x increase plus losing your discount. We want the upgrade to feel earned, not penalized.

What you're really paying for

You're not paying for 200 audits. You're paying for the discipline of running an audit before you sequence. The audit takes 60 seconds; the prep work it replaces takes 10 minutes per prospect. The $19 buys 33 minutes of your time per workday at 200 audits/month. That's the math. Everything else — the dashboard, the Slack integration, the CSV export — is supporting infrastructure for the habit.

If you run 4 audits a month, stay on free. We mean it. The free tier isn't a trial; it's the right tier for you. If you find yourself wanting to run 5 or more in a single afternoon, the daily cap will be the signal — and the upgrade is one click.

The asterisk

One time we'll consider a discount: an annual prepay at 2 months free (so $190 instead of $228). That's not a discount in the de-anchoring sense — it's a cash-flow trade. We've considered it. Haven't shipped it. If you'd find it useful, email hello@savysales.com; we read everything.