Two Thousand Nine Hundred Ninety-Nine

Su Niannian spent a week researching competing products.

For domestic SaaS code review tools, she broke down the features, pricing, and payment models of all eleven products on the market. She put together a Lark spreadsheet with four tabs, seventeen columns, and thirty-two rows.

When she sent it to Han Luyi, she added: "Take a look first. No rush."

Han Luyi replied at eleven that night: "Looked at it."

"Charge 999 for the Pro version. Just add a few features. Keep it cheaper and make up for it in volume."

Su Niannian stared at the screen.

Seventeen columns. Thirty-two rows.

After all her years as a product manager, the first thing she had learned was that developers never knew what their work was worth. The second was that developers always thought lowering the price and chasing volume counted as a pricing strategy.

She replied: "Let's talk in person tomorrow. Bring your laptop."

The next day, at a window seat in Bug Café.

Su Niannian opened the third tab of the spreadsheet: competitor feature comparison.

"First, let's make one thing clear. The difference between the free version and the paid version isn't just having a few more or fewer features. They serve completely different users."

Han Luyi held his Americano and waited for her to continue.

"The free version is for individual developers. It scans for bugs and generates reports. That's enough. One person writes the code, one person fixes it. They don't need anything else. This tier doesn't make money; we just need to get them hooked."

"The paid version is for teams. What do teams need? Three things."

She held up three fingers.

"First, impact assessment." She pointed to a column in the spreadsheet. BugKiller was the only one with data there; the other ten products were all blank. "An individual developer sees a bug and fixes it. They don't need to know how much that bug costs. But teams are different. The people making decisions in a team aren't the ones writing code; they're the ones approving budgets. Tell a CTO, 'There's a bug,' and they'll say to put it in the next sprint. Tell them, 'This bug is costing us six hundred thousand a month,' and they'll approve overtime today to get it fixed."

She looked at Han Luyi.

"Impact assessment isn't for programmers. It's for their bosses. The free version doesn't include it. Want to know what a bug is worth? Upgrade to Pro."

"Second, CI API integration."

"People are already asking about that," Han Luyi said.

"Four CTOs in the closed beta group have asked. Individual developers just run a scan manually and call it a day, but teams want checks to trigger automatically every time code is committed. If a PR doesn't pass BugKiller, it can't be merged. That's workflow-level integration."

She glanced at Han Luyi. "You know what it means once it's integrated into CI, right?"

"Migration costs."

"Exactly. Switching tools means reconfiguring the entire deployment pipeline. Something that can embed itself in infrastructure can't be priced at 999."

"Third, the team dashboard. Bug trend charts, fix rates, health levels for each module, and automatically generated weekly reports. Technically, none of that is complicated, but it has the greatest impact on renewal rates because it lets the boss see every week that BugKiller is saving them money. What they see isn't a tool. It's ROI."

Han Luyi leaned back in his chair.

Su Niannian continued, "So, pricing. Keep the individual version free. For the team Pro version, 2,999."

"How did you decide that?"

"For most companies, a SaaS subscription under three thousand can be approved directly by the technical lead. Above three thousand, it has to go through procurement and get signed off by a VP. 2,999 is the highest price a team leader can approve on the spot."

Han Luyi looked at her for three seconds. "Fine."

Su Niannian closed her laptop. She wanted to say, "Those seventeen columns and thirty-two rows weren't for nothing," but held it in.

"Pro version at 2,999. We'll launch the payment module next week."

Su Niannian sat at her workstation in Beaver Technology. Two windows were open in front of her. On the left was a blank operations weekly report template. On the right was the BugKiller backend.

A payment callback notification popped up.

BugKiller Pro · Monthly Subscription · ¥2,999.00 · Payment Status: Successful · User: Pengcheng Cross-Border Da Technology Co., Ltd.

Her hands froze over the keyboard.

Her three years at Beaver. The first two had been good. In her first year, she had followed the former product director in developing an intelligent customer service system, going through the entire process from requirements research to phased rollout. In her second year, she had led a data dashboard project herself: a seven-person team, launched in three months, with DAU reaching twelve thousand. How to argue with developers, how to use data to shut people down in review meetings, how to turn an idea into a product from scratch—she had learned all of it in those two years. On the day of her promotion review, the former director had written in her evaluation: "The fastest-growing PM on the team."

Then the former director left. The new product director was named Fang Xu, a transfer from some second-tier tech giant. His résumé looked impressive, but nobody in product circles had heard of him. In his first week, he held a product strategy meeting. The title on his PPT read, "Beaver AI Product Matrix 3.0." Su Niannian sat in the second row and noticed that the y-axis on the DAU trend chart on page seven did not start at zero, making the slope look three times steeper. She raised her hand and pointed it out. Fang Xu smiled and nodded. "Okay, thanks. Let's align on it after the meeting."

They never aligned on it.

In her third year, she made a forty-page PPT for her Q1 quarterly presentation. Data, feedback, plans—she had written every page herself. On the day of the presentation, Fang Xu said, "I'll present it. Just stay below and help answer questions." After all forty pages were covered, the VP said it was good. No one mentioned her name the entire time. Last month, Beaver announced its internal innovation awards. She saw a colleague repost it on Moments. The data dashboard she had led had won silver. The recipient listed was Fang Xu. She checked the announcement three times. The name "Su Niannian" was nowhere on it.

She stared at the 2,999 on the screen for a long time.

The spreadsheet she had just explained to Han Luyi—seventeen columns, thirty-two rows, all eleven competitors broken down—hadn't fallen from the sky. It was a skill she had honed through three years of making products at Beaver. But Beaver no longer needed her.

She picked up her phone and called Han Luyi.

"Did you see it?!"

"I saw it."

"The first payment! The first money!!"

She could hear her own voice trembling. Embarrassing. She didn't care anymore.

"Why are you crying over 2,999 yuan?"

"This is the first one! The first one! Do you understand?" She sniffed. "I spent three years at Beaver, and in the end, I couldn't even leave my name on something I made. Someone is willing to pay for the product you built by yourself. Two thousand nine hundred ninety-nine yuan."

"Mm."

Two seconds of silence. She thought he was about to hang up.

"2,999."

"...What?"

"The first revenue, 2,999. That's the price you set, not the 999 I suggested."

Su Niannian opened her mouth, then closed it again.

"I'm going back to watching the backend," she said.

The Beaver coworkers around her glanced over. She placed her phone face-down on the desk and stared blankly at the payment notification on her screen for a long time.

Over the next week.

On the third day, fourteen. On the fifth day, thirty-one. On the seventh day, forty-seven.

Su Niannian created a document on Lark called BugKiller Paid Data Weekly Report #1. The first line read:

As of May 26: 47 paying users, monthly revenue ¥140,953. User retention rate: 82.4%.

She typed three exclamation marks after 82.4%, then deleted two of them. She left one.

The normal retention rate for SaaS was thirty to fifty percent. Eighty-two percent meant users stayed once they started using it. If that number held steady, BugKiller wouldn't need to burn money to acquire customers. Word of mouth would spread on its own.

She sent the document to Han Luyi. He replied with one word: "Mm."

Over at Beaver.

Someone in the product group asked, "Does anyone have the source file for the Q2 user growth data?" Su Niannian typed out a response. She had made those tables—more than thirty from Q1 to Q2—and she had set all the sources, definitions, and formulas herself. Just as she finished typing and was about to send it, someone else had already replied: "I'll ask the new intern."

She deleted the message.

Another time was even more absurd. Someone forwarded Fang Xu's product roadmap in a public Lark channel. It included a user journey map. She recognized it instantly: the color scheme was hers, the node labels were hers, and even the typo in the note for the third touchpoint had not been corrected. Underneath it was written: Created by Fang Xu.

Every day, the happiest moment she had at Beaver was secretly shrinking her browser into a narrow sliver to check the BugKiller backend. She refreshed it once, and the paid user count ticked up by one. She refreshed again, and it jumped again.

Her phone buzzed. A CTO in the closed beta group sent a message: "Do you offer an annual plan? It's more convenient for us to pay annually through procurement."

Her heart was over there, while her body was here. Between them lay an employment contract.

She turned her phone face-down on the desk. The operations weekly report in front of her was still blank.

The new quarter's OKRs had been set. There was only one line: "Assist with operations support-related work."