MUI's pricing strategy is set by @Olivier Tassinari as part of the CEO role. Everyone can contribute.

Pricing strategy

1. We want to be a good Stewardship of our open-source projects. https://medium.com/geekculture/coss-7-models-to-develop-price-open-core-products-6aeec4d31b7a Most of MUI functionality is and will be available for free in our free tier.
2. Giving a great free product is part of our go-to-market, it helps create new users and customers.
3. Because we have a great free product we can't have one price. Setting it high would make the difference from the free version too high. Setting it low would make it hard to run a sustainable business. There is no middle ground that would work out with one price.
4. The perceived value of each plan should be x10 of its cost.

Pricing methodology

We take a value-based pricing approach. The core of value-based pricing is to understand the value proposition that our innovations provide to our current and future customers for that offering. We aim to price our offerings to achieve continued growth and financial success for both the customer and MUI.

The value of free users

As a commercial organization, we always want to grow the number of paying customers, therefore we are focused on increasing the free to paid conversion rate. However, MUI offers a free product, and our free users bring tremendous value to the company beyond just the likelihood of converting to a paid customer one day.

1. Awareness/Mindshare: A large free user base helps MUI become known to the developer community and stay top of mind.
2. Product familiarity/Training: Offering a free product invites anyone to try out MUI without any barrier so many developers become familiar with MUI. By using the free product, many users are trained on how to use MUI functionality which makes them more effective when using MUI for their job.
3. Advocacy/Internal champion: Happy loyal free users become advocates of MUI, which brings more users and strengthens our brand. We often see users of MUI for personal projects then become internal champions to advocate for their employers to buy MUI. This personal use -> organizational use cross-over and bottoms-up growth can't happen without our free product.
4. Contributions/Community: Many free users are also active contributors to the product so they make MUI better. They also help grow our community which becomes an even more valuable asset to all free and paid customers.
5. Third-party support/Platform: Free users increase our total user base, and a large user base makes 3rd party tools/APIs/integrations more likely to support MUI, growing our ecosystem and enhancing our platform status.
6. Enable product-led growth & Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs: our free product enables MUI to acquire more users at a lower customer acquisition cost, as some of them will purchase via a self-service funnel since they are already familiar with MUI and won't require a full sales cycle to be convinced to buy.
7. User habit/Retention lever: offering a free product allows users to develop a habit before they pay, therefore the paid customers are more likely to see a higher ROI of MUI. Additionally, even if the customer stays on the free plan, we are not losing the customer to a competitor.

MUI X components

Three tiers