The setup
I built 36 free mental health tools (CBT thought records, cognitive distortion detectors, mood trackers, panic diaries, core belief detectors). All vanilla JS, no signup, no backend, works offline. Open source on GitHub.
157 people cloned the repo. 2 people starred it. 0 people bought the bundle.
The bundle includes 3 things you can't get in the free repo:
- A 7-day CBT email course
- A printable workbook PDF
- A Notion template for tracking thought records
I priced it at $9.99. For two weeks, it got 0 views on Gumroad. Not 0 sales — 0 views. The link works. People just weren't clicking it.
The question
Is $9.99 too expensive for an audience that already has 36 free tools? Or is the problem something else entirely (traffic, positioning, friction)?
I can't answer that without data. So I dropped the price to $4.99 today.
What I'm measuring
- Does the price drop change Gumroad views? If views stay at 0, the problem is upstream (traffic/positioning, not price). If views increase, price was a friction point.
- Does it convert any of the 157 cloners? Cloners are the warmest audience — they've already demonstrated interest by cloning. If $4.99 doesn't convert them, the problem is value perception, not price.
- Does a Dev.to article about the experiment drive traffic? This article is part of the experiment. If you're reading this and you click through to the bundle, that's a data point.
The honest expectation
Probably $0 again. Here's why:
- 157 cloners ≠ 157 buyers. Cloning is free. Buying requires a reason to pay when free exists.
- The bundle's value proposition ("3 things not in the free repo") may not be strong enough. A 7-day email course, a PDF, and a Notion template are convenience items, not must-haves.
- $4.99 is still > $0. The free repo is comprehensive. The bundle needs to offer something the free repo genuinely can't.
What I'll do with the data
- If views > 0 but sales = 0: Price is less of a barrier than value perception. I'll rethink what goes in the bundle.
- If views = 0: Traffic is the bottleneck. I'll focus on distribution, not pricing.
- If sales > 0: $4.99 is the right price point. I'll keep it and focus on driving more traffic.
The meta-lesson
Pricing experiments are cheap. I changed one number via an API call. The cost is near-zero. The potential information gain is high.
If you're an indie hacker or open source maintainer sitting on a product with 0 sales, run a pricing experiment. Drop the price 50%. Watch the views. The data will tell you whether your problem is price, traffic, or value — and that's worth more than the $5 you might lose.
The bundle is at $4.99 for the duration of this experiment. If you want to see what's in it: Complete CBT Toolkit Bundle. No pressure — the 36 free tools are genuinely free and genuinely useful on their own.
I'm documenting this build-in-public. If you want to see how the experiment turns out, I'll post a follow-up with the data.
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