Why Our Subscription Has No Tiers (And Why Every Other Outdoor App Does)

Most outdoor apps you’ve used have feature tiers. There’s a free or starter level, a middle tier branded Premium or Plus, and a top tier called Elite or Pro. You squint at the comparison table, try to remember whether 3D maps were in the middle column or the right one, and eventually pick whichever tier has the one feature you actually need. That’s not an accident, and it’s not a bug. That’s a pricing strategy doing its job, and it’s the dominant strategy in the category for good reasons.

Baseline Maps doesn’t do that. There’s one feature set, and every feature is included for every subscriber. You still choose how to pay — $7.99 a month or $34.99 a year for the same full app — but that choice never changes what’s in your hands on the trail. This post is the honest case for that decision: what one feature set gives up, what it gains, what kind of company it forces us to be, and why we think the trade is worth it for a product like ours. If you’ve ever stared at a three-column pricing page and felt vaguely manipulated, you’re going to recognize a lot of the shape of this argument.

First, the part people get wrong

“No tiers” does not mean “one way to pay.” We bill monthly and annually like most apps — $7.99 a month, or $34.99 a year for the better value. What we don’t do is split the product itself into good / better / best. There is no level where the satellite layers, the GMU boundaries, the live river flow, or the offline maps are held back until you pay more. Monthly and annual subscribers get the identical, complete app. The only thing your billing choice changes is the price and the cadence.

And before any of that, every subscription starts with a 14-day free trial that’s fully unlocked — no paywall during the trial, every feature available from the moment you create an account. You see the whole product before you decide whether to keep it monthly or annually. That’s deliberate: we’d rather you judge the real thing than a hobbled “free tier” designed to make the upgrade look necessary.

Why most outdoor apps use feature tiers

Tiered pricing is the default in software because it works. It maximizes revenue by letting price-sensitive users pay less for a thinner product while extracting more from power users who’d happily pay double for the full one. It also makes marketing easier — a “starting at” headline number anchors low and looks generous, while the comparison table quietly guides serious users upward toward the column with the features they actually need. Almost every category leader in outdoor apps uses some version of this structure, and they’re not wrong to. It is a rational, well-studied response to a market with genuinely mixed willingness to pay, and we respect the math behind it even when we choose differently.

There are also non-revenue reasons tiering persists. It gives growth teams something to optimize — upgrade rates, tier-mix ratios, expansion revenue. Those are real metrics with real dashboards. We just don’t think they belong on the dashboard of a product like ours.

What feature tiering actually does

Price discrimination is the formal economic term for charging different prices to different people for substantially the same product. Splitting features across tiers is the most common way software does it, and it’s been studied for a hundred years. The middle tier is priced to feel like a deal; the top tier is priced to capture users who’d pay almost anything for the full experience. It’s effective revenue capture, but it also means two people standing on the same trail can be carrying very different versions of what is, underneath, the same map drawn by the same hands.

Notice the move that makes this work: the features have to be cut apart for the prices to mean anything. A plan picker is only persuasive if the cheaper plan is missing something you want. That’s the part we opted out of — not the idea of monthly versus annual, but the idea of holding the product hostage to the upgrade.

The internal pressure tiering creates

The hidden cost of feature tiers is internal. Once a company has Premium and Elite, every new feature triggers a meeting about which tier it belongs in. Builders stop asking “is this useful?” and start asking “is this a Premium feature or an Elite feature?” Product decisions get warped toward justifying the upper tier rather than toward what users actually need on the ground in a parking lot before dawn. We’ve watched this dynamic play out in other categories, and we didn’t want a version of those meetings in our calendar.

The deeper problem is that tiering also creates pressure to deliberately leave features out of the lower tier — not because they belong elsewhere, but because the upgrade path needs justification. Over time, the lower tier gets quietly hollowed out, and the user pays more for the same product they had a year ago. We’ve seen that pattern in other categories too, and we promised ourselves we’d never be in the position of considering it. When everyone is on the same feature set, there is no lower tier to hollow out.

What we give up with one feature set

A single feature set leaves real money on the table. The serious power user who would happily pay for an all-features “Elite” level still pays the same $34.99 a year — or $7.99 a month — as everyone else, because there’s nothing more expensive to sell them. The foregone revenue from price-discriminating against power users is real, not theoretical. It is the price of the philosophy, and we pay it on purpose, because the alternative costs more in product clarity than it gains in revenue, and because a flatter pricing curve tends to attract a more patient kind of customer.

Why the simplicity is worth more

Simplicity is not a marketing word here. It’s an operating constraint we hold ourselves to. One feature set means the comparison table is one column wide. It means onboarding asks “monthly or annual?” and nothing more — there’s no “choose your features” screen and no tooltip explaining why you’d want the more expensive product. It means support tickets never start with “I think I’m on the wrong tier.” Every feature ships to every subscriber, which means we ship features for users instead of for the upsell funnel.

There’s a quieter benefit too. When the answer to “is this feature included?” is always yes, trust accumulates. Users stop reading the fine print and start using the product. That trust is hard to win back once it’s spent on a pricing maze, and we’d rather not spend it in the first place.

When tiers make sense (and when they don’t)

Tiers make sense when you have genuinely different products for genuinely different audiences. A consumer recreational app and a commercial guide-services tool are different products with different support needs, different liability profiles, different feature requirements, and different price points. That is not what most outdoor app tiering looks like today. Most tiering is a single product cut into pieces to extract more revenue from the same audience standing in the same parking lot. The first kind is honest market segmentation, and we’d do it without hesitation if the audiences ever really diverged. The second is a paywall dressed up to look like a plan picker.

Will we ever change?

If we ever build a genuinely separate product — a tool for fishing guides who need client-facing trip reports, or a layer pack for state agencies, or a commercial license for outfitters — that would be a real tier because it would be a real different product with a real different audience. We won’t split recreational hunters and anglers into Premium and Elite to chase a higher revenue-per-user number. If the economics ever demand more revenue per user, we will raise the single price first, transparently, and let users decide whether the product is still worth it at the new number. What we won’t do is start locking features you already have behind a higher level.

The bottom line

Average revenue per user under one feature set is naturally capped — there’s no Elite column carrying the blended average up. Tiered competitors will always be able to publish a higher headline number for exactly that reason. We’ve accepted a lower ceiling in exchange for a flatter, more predictable revenue line and a product team that spends zero hours arguing about which tier a new feature belongs in. A clean pricing model compounds into trust and retention in ways a clever one rarely does.

Baseline Maps is a quietly capable map for people who’d rather spend their time outside than read a comparison table or sit through a plan-upgrade flow. Start with the 14-day free trial — fully unlocked, every feature, no paywall — then keep it for $7.99 a month or $34.99 a year, whichever fits how you’d rather pay. Same full app on both. No Premium-vs-Elite footnotes, no “this feature requires an upgrade” modal between you and the trailhead. If you want to see what we’re working on next, the Development Queue lives inside the app — it’s the same roadmap we work from, visible to every subscriber, because everyone’s on the same one.