Why Our Subscription Has No Tiers (And Why Every Other Outdoor App Does)

Most outdoor apps you’ve used have three tiers. There’s a free or starter level, a middle tier branded Premium or Plus, and a top tier called Elite or Pro. You squint at the comparison table, try to remember whether 3D maps were in the middle column or the right one, and eventually pick whichever tier has the one feature you actually need. That’s not an accident, and it’s not a bug. That’s a pricing strategy doing its job, and it’s the dominant strategy in the category for good reasons. Baseline Maps doesn’t have tiers. There’s one price, $34.99 a year, and every feature is included for every subscriber. This post is the honest case for that decision — what it gives up, what it gains, what kind of company it forces us to be, and why we think the trade is worth it for a product like ours. If you’ve ever stared at a three-column pricing page and felt vaguely manipulated, you’re going to recognize a lot of the shape of this argument.

Why most outdoor apps have tiers

Tiered pricing is the default in software because it works. It maximizes revenue by letting price-sensitive users pay less while extracting more from power users who’d happily pay double. It also makes marketing easier — a “starting at” headline number anchors low and looks generous, while the comparison table quietly guides serious users upward toward the column with the features they actually need. Almost every category leader in outdoor apps uses some version of this structure, and they’re not wrong to. It is a rational, well-studied response to a market with genuinely mixed willingness to pay, and we respect the math behind it even when we choose differently.

There are also non-revenue reasons tiering persists. It gives sales and growth teams something to optimize — upgrade rates, tier-mix ratios, expansion revenue. Those are real metrics with real dashboards. We just don’t think they belong on the dashboard of a product like ours.

What price discrimination actually does

Price discrimination is the formal economic term for charging different prices to different people for substantially the same product. Tiering is the most common way software does it, and it’s been studied for a hundred years. The middle tier is priced to feel like a deal; the top tier is priced to capture users who’d pay almost anything for the full experience. It’s effective revenue capture, but it also means two users standing on the same trail end up paying very different prices for what is, at the core, the same underlying map drawn by the same hands.

The internal pressure tiering creates

The hidden cost of tiers is internal. Once a company has Premium and Elite, every new feature triggers a meeting about which tier it belongs in. Builders stop asking “is this useful?” and start asking “is this a Premium feature or an Elite feature?” Product decisions get warped toward justifying the upper tier rather than toward what users actually need on the ground in a parking lot before dawn. We’ve watched this dynamic play out in other categories, and we didn’t want a version of those meetings in our calendar.

The deeper problem is that tiering also creates pressure to deliberately leave features out of the lower tier — not because they belong elsewhere, but because the upgrade path needs justification. Over time, the lower tier gets quietly hollowed out, and the user pays more for the same product they had a year ago. We’ve seen that pattern in other categories too, and we promised ourselves we’d never be in the position of considering it.

What we give up with one price

A single tier leaves real money on the table. The serious power user who would happily pay $99 a year for an Elite tier still pays $34.99 like everyone else. Multiply that across thousands of users and the foregone average revenue per user is not theoretical — it is a number we can estimate to within a few percent, and it is meaningful. It is the price of the philosophy, and we keep an honest spreadsheet of what we’re declining. We chose to pay it because the alternative costs more in product clarity than it gains in revenue, and because a flatter pricing curve tends to attract a more patient kind of customer.

Why the simplicity is worth more

Simplicity is not a marketing word here. It’s an operating constraint we hold ourselves to. One price means the comparison table is one column wide. One price means the onboarding flow doesn’t need a “choose your plan” screen and a tooltip explaining why you’d want the more expensive one. One price means support tickets never start with “I think I’m on the wrong tier.” Every feature ships to every subscriber, which means we ship features for users instead of for the upsell funnel.

There’s a quieter benefit too. When the answer to “is this feature included?” is always yes, trust accumulates. Users stop reading the fine print and start using the product. That trust is hard to win back once it’s spent on a pricing maze, and we’d rather not spend it in the first place.

When tiers make sense (and when they don’t)

Tiers make sense when you have genuinely different products for genuinely different audiences. A consumer recreational tier and a commercial guide-services tier are different products with different support needs, different liability profiles, different feature requirements, and different price points. That is not what most outdoor app tiering looks like today. Most tiering is a single product cut into pieces to extract more revenue from the same audience standing in the same parking lot. The first kind is honest market segmentation, and we’d do it without hesitation if the audiences ever really diverged. The second is a paywall dressed up to look like a plan picker.

Will we ever change?

If we ever build a genuinely separate product — a tool for fishing guides who need client-facing trip reports, or a layer pack for state agencies, or a commercial license for outfitters — that would be a real tier because it would be a real different product with a real different audience. We won’t split recreational hunters and anglers into Premium and Elite to chase a higher ARPU number. If the unit economics ever demand more revenue per user, we will raise the single price first, transparently, and let users decide whether the product is still worth it at the new number.

What happens to ARPU

Average revenue per user under a single tier is mathematically capped at the single price, minus churn and platform fees. Tiered competitors will always be able to publish a higher headline ARPU because their power users carry the blended average up. We’ve accepted a lower theoretical ceiling in exchange for a flatter, more predictable revenue line and a product team that spends zero hours arguing about which tier a new feature belongs in. The accountants will tell you tiered ARPU is better in the short run. The product, over a few years, will tell you the opposite story — that a clean pricing model compounds into retention in ways a clever one rarely does.

Baseline Maps is a quietly capable map for people who’d rather spend their time outside than reading a comparison table or sitting through a plan-upgrade flow. One price, every feature, no upsell screens, no Premium-vs-Elite footnotes, no “this feature requires an upgrade” modal between you and the trailhead. If you want to see what we’re working on next, the Development Queue lives inside the app — it’s the same roadmap we work from, visible to every subscriber on every tier, because there’s only one tier and there’s only one of us building it.