Why We Sell One Paid Edition (And Why Most Outdoor Apps Sell Three)

Most outdoor apps you’ve used have a feature ladder. 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.

Update, October 2026: for a few months this year Baseline also had a Free Edition. It was retired on October 9, 2026 in favor of the one paid edition described below, with the first week free on the annual plan. Why is in Keeping Baseline alive.

Baseline Maps sells one thing: Professional Edition, which includes every paid feature in every mode and every state. You choose how to pay for it — $7.99 a month or $34.99 a year — but there’s no higher column to climb. This post is the case for that decision: what it gives up, what it gains, and why we think the trade is worth it for a product like ours.

First, the shape of it

One edition, one decision. Professional Edition is the maps, live river flows and flow alerts, land ownership, waypoints and GPX import, Fireteam, regulations, draw odds, the ballistic calculator, offline maps, AI intel, flow and fishing forecasts, radar, HD satellite and 3D, bathymetry, the Tide Planner, the full range kit, and more — for every mode and every state, with no per-state surcharges.

Monthly and annual are the same Professional Edition. The only thing your billing choice changes is the price, the cadence, and the free week: the annual plan starts with seven free days, monthly does not.

Why a free week instead of a feature ladder

A trial asks you to judge a product on a deadline, often in the wrong season: a week in March tells a steelhead angler nothing about how the app holds up in September. We know that. We tried the alternative, a Free Edition with no clock, and the community it brought in grew faster than the servers, maps and data feeds behind it could be paid for by the people who upgraded. One edition with a free week is the version that keeps the lights on.

The honest trade-off: you have seven days to decide, and if you’re in the wrong season for your mode, that week shows you less than a whole season would. Cancel before day seven and you pay nothing, and the Development Queue is open to everyone who stays.

Why most outdoor apps use feature ladders

Tiered pricing is the default in software because it works. It maximizes revenue by letting price-sensitive users pay less for a thinner product while extracting more from power users who’d happily pay double for the full one. 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. 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 ladders persist. They give growth teams something to optimize — upgrade rates, tier-mix ratios, expansion revenue. Those are real metrics with real dashboards. We just don’t think a second and third paid column belong in a product like ours.

The internal pressure a ladder creates

The hidden cost of a ladder is internal. Once a company has Premium and Elite, every new feature triggers a meeting about which paid tier it belongs in. Builders stop asking “is this useful?” and start asking “is this a Premium feature or an Elite feature?” With one paid edition, the question is simpler: does a new feature belong in the free map everyone carries, or in Professional? There’s no third answer, and there’s no upper column to justify by holding features back from the middle one.

What we give up with one paid edition

A single paid edition leaves real money on the table. The serious power user who would happily pay for an all-features “Elite” level still pays the same $34.99 a year — or $7.99 a month — as everyone else on Professional, because there’s nothing more expensive to sell them. That foregone revenue is real, not theoretical. It is the price of the philosophy, and we pay it on purpose, because a flatter pricing curve tends to attract a more patient kind of customer.

Why the simplicity is worth more

One paid edition means the comparison table has two columns, and the second one has everything. It means the upgrade question is “do I want Professional?” rather than “which of three paid plans has the layer I need, in the state I hunt?” It means support tickets don’t start with “I think I’m on the wrong tier.” When you pay, the answer to “is this feature included?” is yes.

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 app and a commercial guide-services tool 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 of it 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.

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 revenue-per-user number. If the economics ever demand more revenue per user, we will raise the one price first, transparently, and let people decide whether Professional is still worth it at the new number.

The bottom line

Average revenue per user under one paid edition is naturally capped — there’s no Elite column carrying the blended average up. We’ve accepted a lower ceiling in exchange for a pricing page anyone can read in ten seconds and a product team that spends zero hours arguing about which paid tier a feature belongs in.

Start the annual plan and the first week is on us; after that it’s $34.99 a year, or $7.99 a month if you’d rather not commit. No Premium-vs-Elite footnotes, no per-state surcharges. 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.