Why Copacetic costs what it costs

Somebody asked me recently why Copacetic is so much cheaper than the market leader. Not "how" — "why." As if there had to be a catch.

There isn't one. But the question is fair, because most software pricing in this sector isn't really pricing. It's a filter. £69 to £129 a user, per month, isn't a number someone arrived at by working out what a solo solicitor can sensibly spend on practice management. It's a number that makes sense if you're building for firms with fee-earners in double figures and a partner who signs off software budgets without blinking. Everyone underneath that gets the same product at the same price, because nobody built a version of the pricing model for them. They just get to feel the squeeze.

I spent over a decade in legal operations before I built anything, mostly around firms that were nowhere near that size. I watched sole practitioners and two-partner outfits pay enterprise rates for software they used a fraction of, because the alternative was a spreadsheet and a prayer. That's not a market working properly. That's a market where the smallest firms subsidise features they'll never touch, priced by people who've never had to choose between software and a member of staff.

So Copacetic starts free, and the paid tiers are priced like I actually remember what it's like to watch every line of outgoings. Not because I think practice management software should be worth less — I think it should be worth exactly what it is to a firm that size, which is a lot, just not a lot of money. Undercutting the incumbent isn't the strategy. Building the product for a different firm from the start, and letting the price follow honestly from that, is.

I still expect someone to ask me the same question again in six months, once we've added more to the product. My answer won't change. The firms this is built for were never the ones who could afford to be an afterthought.