Alina Petrova

Imagine that you are about to join a startup (before raising funds) as a part-time employee.
You are paid for work (compensation is like in any existing, well-established company in the industry, but you do not have regular employee benefits covering 401 plan, no equity, no health care plan, HO equipment fee, etc.)

You hope that after raising funds, you will become a full-time employee and receive benefits.

We re usually very good at creating to-do lists for work.
But what about everything outside of work?

I ve started turning my personal habits into a checklist to build discipline and make these habits non-negotiable over time.

Here s mine:

Hey everyone,

I've built my product around traditional SaaS pricing (monthly tiers), but I m starting to wonder if that model is getting outdated, especially with more AI-powered and compute-heavy tools entering the market.
That shift requires real architectural changes, instrumentation, metering, billing logic, and UI changes, not just pricing tweaks. It s something I m starting to seriously think about for my own product.

In particular, AI usage has real COGs (every prompt costs money), and I m seeing more platforms experimenting with usage-based models, or hybrids like SaaS base + usage + overage.

For those of you building AI or compute-intensive tools: