I’ve been building apps with my business partner Steve over at nervous.net and I need to talk about something that is making us both lose our minds.

Software pricing has become predatory. Not “oh that’s a little expensive” predatory. Like, “we have identified that your business literally cannot function without this category of tool and we are going to charge you accordingly” predatory. The kind of pricing that makes you wonder if the people setting it have ever actually run a small business, or if they just learned the phrase “value-based pricing” at a conference and decided it meant “charge whatever you want because they’re trapped.”

Let me give you an example. Fitness studio management software. This is the stuff that handles scheduling, memberships, payments — the boring but essential backbone of running a studio. A few years ago there were a handful of decent options at reasonable prices. Then private equity showed up.

And private equity, in case you haven’t noticed, has a very specific playbook. They buy a company that people depend on. They “optimize” it. And by “optimize” I mean they raise prices, lock features behind additional paywalls, and add platform fees that would make a loan shark blush. Some of these fitness studio apps are now charging $300 a month plus a 20% platform fee on transactions processed through their system. Twenty percent. Of your revenue. For the privilege of using their scheduling tool.

Others take the opposite approach — they price low to get you in the door and then nickel-and-dime you for every feature that makes the software actually usable. Oh you want reports? That’s a tier upgrade. You want to send emails to your own clients? Premium feature. You want the app to not look like it was designed in 2011? That’ll be extra.

And then there’s my personal favorite: opaque pricing. No pricing page on the website. “Contact sales for a quote.” Which is corporate speak for “we’re going to look at your business, figure out the maximum amount you can afford, and charge you that.” It’s the SaaS equivalent of a mechanic sucking air through their teeth before telling you what’s wrong with your car.

This isn’t just fitness studios either. Productivity apps have entered their villain arc too. Thirty dollars per seat per month for what is, at its core, a to-do list with a calendar. Per seat. So if you have a ten-person team that’s $300 a month to organize tasks. Three thousand six hundred dollars a year. For task management. I could hire an actual human person to stand in my office with a whiteboard and a marker for that money and they’d probably also make coffee.

The pattern is the same everywhere Steve and I look. A useful tool gets built. It gains traction because it solves a real problem at a fair price. Then it either gets acquired by private equity or the founders decide they want to be a unicorn, and suddenly the thing that used to cost $10 a month costs $30 a seat with an enterprise tier that requires you to “talk to sales” which again is just code for “we’re going to charge you more.”

Sarah has been listening to Steve and me rant about this for weeks now. She’s a saint. Or she’s tuning us out entirely. Either way.

But here’s where I land on this — and I swear this isn’t just a plug for what we’re building. The reason Steve and I are making our own tools is because we got tired of the alternative. We kept looking at what was available and doing the math and going “wait, seriously?” We’re not trying to build the next billion-dollar SaaS empire. We’re trying to build things that work, that cost a fair price, and that don’t treat the people using them like marks at a carnival.

I don’t think every software company is evil. I don’t think charging money for good software is wrong. People should get paid for their work. But there’s a difference between charging a fair price for something valuable and engineering your entire pricing structure around extracting the maximum possible revenue from people who have no other choice. One is a business. The other is a shakedown.

The thing that gets me is that this is all so normalized. We’ve just accepted that software costs a fortune per month per person forever, and that prices only go up, and that the company can change the terms whenever they want. We’ve accepted that “per seat” pricing is rational even when the marginal cost of an additional user to the company is effectively zero. We’ve accepted opaque pricing as standard practice instead of calling it what it is, which is a red flag.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here. Steve and I are building what we can. We’re trying to do it differently. And every time we look at a competitor’s pricing page — when they even have one — it just makes us more motivated.

If you’re running a small business and you’re getting squeezed by your software stack, just know that you’re not imagining it. It really is that bad. And it doesn’t have to be.