We offered an "Unlimited" plan for $99/mo. One user cost us $1,200 in server bills.

When we launched our SaaS, we wanted a pricing model that was simple and appealing. We offered a $99/month "Unlimited" plan that allowed users to process as many files and API requests as they wanted. We thought it would attract power users and scale well.

For the first few months, it worked fine. Most users stayed well within reasonable limits. But then we noticed our AWS bill spiking.

I dug into the usage analytics and found one single account on the $99 plan that was processing over 50,000 API requests a day. They had essentially integrated our tool into their own high-traffic product and were using us as their backend infrastructure. Our cloud costs to support this one user were averaging $1,200 a month. We were literally paying $1,100 a month for the privilege of having them as a customer.

When I reached out to them to discuss upgrading to a usage-based tier, they were furious. "The plan says unlimited! I bought unlimited!" They refused to upgrade, and we had to make a tough decision: either eat the loss, or break our promise and throttle them.

We ended up capping the "Unlimited" plan for new users and migrating existing ones to a fair-use policy, which caused a massive wave of churn (about 15% of our user base left). We completely destroyed our reputation because we tried to make pricing too simple.

For founders who have been through this: How do you transition away from an "Unlimited" plan without destroying customer trust?

Do you grandfather the abusive users and just accept the loss? Do you introduce a "fair use" policy retroactively? I need to figure out how to fix our unit economics before we go bankrupt.