Original Summary

Hey, so we've been working on Patronus for a while now and finally opened our API to the public. It can check prompts, files, urls and MCP Server, mainly for things like prompt injections and sensitive data. The slightly unusual part is how we built the backend. Instead of putting another LLM behind every API request, most of our inference runs on small encoder models we train ourselves and CPUs. That made the API much cheaper to run than we expected. And now we're stuck on a fairly basic SaaS question: how much of it should we give away? Our current idea is to make the free account genuinely usable instead of giving people 100 requests and calling it a free tier. If someone is building a small project, I'd rather have them use Patronus for free for six months and eventually need more throughput than make $9 from them today. For the paid plans we're thinking along the same lines. We'd rather charge for higher throughput and serious usage than squeeze margin out of every token going through the API. I'm curious how other SaaS founders handle this when the marginal cost of the product is very low. Did a generous free tier actually turn into paid users for you, or did you mostly collect thousands of accounts that never converted? Happy to get some insights :)   submitted by   /u/PatronusProtect [link]   [comments]

中文概览

中文标题： 你愿意把这么多SaaS功能免费送出去吗？

Patronus开放API，用于检查提示、文件、URL和MCP Server，主要防护提示注入与敏感数据；后端主要用自训小型编码器模型和CPU推理以降低成本。作者询问免费层应给多少，倾向让小型项目免费使用六个月，付费针对更高吞吐和重度使用，并想了解低边际成本下慷慨免费层的转化经验。

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：讨论SaaS免费层与付费定价策略，属商业研究
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/9/25 03:26:47