Do not charge for features; give all the features so people can imagine.

principle — attributed to Steve Gottlieb

Gottlieb's pricing philosophy at Shindig is structural rather than tactical. A straightforward price per user per hour, halved for nonprofits and educational institutions. No feature add-ons. The reasoning is that events require complete freedom and imagination to conceive, and feature-gating limits what the producer can attempt. The business model bet is that producers given full creative range will use more of the platform more deeply than producers being nickel-and-dimed for each unlock. Gottlieb's framing is the inverse of the standard SaaS playbook. He treats the producer's imagination as the constraint to remove, not as a vector for upsell.

For platform builders thinking about pricing models for creative tools. The principle is most useful as a corrective to the default toward feature-tiered pricing when the tool's value depends on the user's creative reach.

pricing, feature-access, creativity, platform-business-model