Is offering heavy discounts for annual plan a safety net or a ticking time bomb for early startups?

Giving users a 40% discount for paying annually felt amazing when we needed upfront cash to fund a month of development. But looking at our servers and support load months later, those deeply discounted annual accounts locked us into low-margin support commitments while our costs kept rising.

at what stage of growth did you stop offering steep annual discounts and start charging what the product was actually worth?