Why I'm offering ten UK window cleaners founder pricing for life

Squeegify just opened a Founder Operator programme. The first ten UK window cleaners to subscribe with the code FOUNDER25 get 25% off any tier, locked for life. That means Solo at £11.24 a month instead of £14.99, Growth at £18.74 instead of £24.99, Scale at £29.99 instead of £39.99, Fleet at £44.99 instead of £59.99. The lock holds for as long as the subscription stays active. Once Stripe records the tenth redemption, the code blocks itself and every operator after pays retail.

Here is the reasoning, written for the operators thinking "is this a real deal or a marketing trick".

What founder pricing actually means

The locked price is permanent. It is not a 12-month introductory rate, it is not a "first year free" trick, it is not a coupon that expires when the renewal hits. As long as the subscription stays active, the founder keeps 25% off their tier, every month, every renewal, indefinitely.

If we 10x the platform price three years from now, the founder still pays 75% of whatever they signed up at. If we drop the price (we will not, but for the sake of the example), the founder gets the lower rate. The deal is "for as long as you stay on, you never pay more than the discounted line on your invoice today".

There is no clause that says "the founder rate ends when we raise prices" or "the founder rate is only valid for the first plan we launched". The lock is on the customer, not the product.

Why I capped it at ten

Two reasons. The first is logistical, the second is honest scarcity.

Logistical. Each founder operator gets a direct WhatsApp line to me and priority on the roadmap. Ten operators in close contact is a real cohort I can support · twenty would be two weeks of nothing else, and I am still running the round in Tallinn that pays my mortgage.

Honest scarcity. A "first 10" offer with a real counter is more credible than "founding 50" or "first 100" where the math implies "we will never actually close this". Ten is small enough that someone reading the page understands they need to act, but large enough that we get a real cohort of early operators rather than just one or two pity signups.

Why I'm doing this at all

The blunt answer is that I would rather have ten operators paying the founder rate forever than zero operators paying retail forever. Squeegify is a new product. The pricing page has not been tested at scale. The signup flow has not been stress-tested. The widget install on a real third-party site has not been done end-to-end by anyone except me. None of that improves with no customers.

The founders fix all of that. They give the product a real workout. They give me real feedback. They are the operators I owe a beer to in three years when I tell the launch story at a conference.

In return for that, they pay less. Permanently.

What the founders get beyond the price

Two things, written into the deal:

1. Founder pricing locked for life. The retail rate does not apply to them, ever, as long as their subscription stays active.

2. Direct WhatsApp line. They get my mobile number for 12 months. Founder feature requests go to the top of the roadmap. If the widget misbehaves on their specific theme, I fix it the same week.

These are not features the platform supports for everyone. They are personal commitments from me to the first ten operators who take a chance on a new product.

The maths on the operator side

A working round in the UK averages roughly £250 of recurring annual revenue per new residential customer. One window cleaning round, maintained, four times a year, at maybe £15 per clean, plus the occasional gutter or fascia job. The number varies by region and what the operator includes in their service, but £250 is the conservative end.

Squeegify Solo on the founder rate is £11.24 a month. That is under £135 a year. Growth on the founder rate is £18.74 a month, under £225 a year.

One booked customer a year pays for the founder Solo plan for two years. A single Growth-tier operator covers their entire annual subscription with the first job booked through the widget.

The way it gets you that extra customer is by replying to your website enquiries in ten seconds instead of twenty-four hours. Customers who fill in a contact form on a Saturday and get a quote on Monday have already requested quotes from two other cleaners. Squeegify replies before they go to bed.

The maths is robust across the whole operator spectrum. A one-van operator needs one extra booked job a year to cover Solo. A ten-van firm running Fleet covers the £44.99 founder rate with one booked job a quarter. Same product, same maths, different volumes.

The maths on my side

Ten founders averaging the Growth tier at £18.74 a month is roughly £188 of recurring monthly revenue. Annualised, around £2,250.

That is not enough to live on. It is enough to pay for the Anthropic API spend, the Google Maps quota, the Vercel hosting bill, and a year of focused product work without taking outside funding. It is also enough proof to charge new operators the retail rate with confidence.

The retail tier kicks in at operator number eleven and prices off the demand the founders create.

When the counter hits zero

The marketing page has a live counter (10 / 10 founder spots remaining) backed by /api/founding-seats, which reads the real subscription state from Stripe and Supabase. When the tenth slot is confirmed, three things happen:

1. The FOUNDER25 code stops resolving. Stripe blocks the eleventh redemption automatically at the coupon level. 2. The hero CTA changes from "Claim founder pricing" to "Start free trial". 3. The sticky mobile bar changes from "From £11.24/mo with FOUNDER25" to "From £14.99/mo".

There is no "we are going to extend it just this once". The cap is enforced atomically at the Stripe checkout layer. If two operators try to claim slot ten at the same instant, only one succeeds and the other gets refunded with an apology email.

On the "card required" question

The 7-day free trial does not require a card on file. Pick a plan, create your account, get full dashboard access immediately. On day 7 you add payment via Stripe to keep going · or walk away with no charge. If you add payment during the trial, Stripe charges on day 8. If you do not, dashboard access pauses on day 8 until you add a card. Standard SaaS billing, no surprise charges.

This is a recent change · the previous "card required at checkout" trial was friction we did not need to charge for. Conversion from trial-with-card was roughly 60% on the card-required path. Early data on no-card trials suggests more signups, slightly lower per-signup conversion, but materially higher total paid customers per signup pool. The founders programme runs on the same trial mechanics as the standard plans.

How to claim a slot

The button on the pricing page does three things in sequence:

1. Reserves slot N in our database (TTL 30 minutes · if you abandon the Stripe page, the slot frees up automatically). 2. Redirects you to Stripe Checkout with the Founder Monthly or Yearly price selected. 3. On successful checkout, our webhook confirms the slot and you get a welcome email with the WhatsApp number to me.

If you click the button and the counter has just hit zero, you get sent to the retail signup instead of left at a dead end.

Honest about the risk

You are buying into a product I started building seven months ago. The widget on the pricing page is the real production widget · go try it on your own address. The dashboard works. The AI counts windows pretty well across the UK property types I have tested. The booking emails fire correctly. Operators who install the widget see real quotes land in their dashboard.

But it is a new product. It has not survived a winter season at scale. The accuracy claims on the pricing page are deliberately phrased "typically within ±2 windows" rather than a precise percentage because the benchmark dataset is not yet at 50 verified addresses. The platform has been tested by maybe 20 operators, mostly people I know in person.

If you want the safety of a six-year-old SaaS with thousands of customers, Squeegee or Jobber is the right choice. They are good products. If you want to be one of ten people who shape a new tool and get a permanent price for the early bet, this is the deal.

The link

squeegify.co.uk/pricing#founder

If you have questions, email me directly · robin@squeegify.co.uk. I read every one.

- Robin