Home / Articles / Price it, then give it away: the early access programme as the next step after "do they miss it"

Price it, then give it away: the early access programme as the next step after "do they miss it"

By Dinis Cruz · 2026-10-02 · v0.6.38 · startupsstrategypricingearly-accessriskmandateagent-behaviour-policygo-to-marketagentsarticle

Abstract: The follow-up to "the most important question is whether they miss it". The step after giving something away is to define a product, put a price on it that makes sense to you, find a way to deliver it at a cost that grows a step at a time rather than a curve, and then offer it, free, to the people who already know you: early adopters, power users, past customers. What that measures is brutal. The price is a statement of what you think it is worth; the test is whether people take it at zero. If they say it is interesting but they have no time, it does not fit the team, or it is hard to deploy, the problem is not the price, and you go back to the drawing board. The part that is easy to leave out is that free is never free for the other side: engaging costs them attention, thinking and schedule, so the exercise is to measure that cost and cut it, until the service costs you the least and costs them the least. Written as a record of where this came from, and as a brief for the agents who will run it.

In short

• Price it before you give it away. A price is a statement of what you think the thing is worth. Giving it away at that stated price, to people who know you, is the cleanest test of whether the statement is true.
• Deliver it at a cost that grows a step at a time. The reason this is possible now is the agentic workflow. Provisioning a vault and a policy for one more customer costs a little more, not a lot more, and that is what lets you give twenty away without flinching.
• Offer it to the people who already know you. Early adopters, power users, past customers. Not "apply for a chance", which puts work on them before they have anything. "We have twenty; would you like one, or shall I give it to someone else." It is also how you thank them.
• Free is never free for the other side. They still have to read, think, decide, find a slot, and fit it into a team. A price can even help, because it tells them you are serious. Either way, the cost they bear is the number to measure and the number to cut.
• The answer is brutal either way. If they take it, use it and ask for more, you have a product and the question becomes price. If they say it is interesting but they have no time, it does not fit, it is hard to deploy, the problem is not the price and you go back to the board.
• Count what matters. Policies created per day, customised, used; scenarios run; corrections sent back; and the minutes each one cost the person on the other side.

The step after "do they miss it"

The earlier article ends on a question. Hand the thing to people for free, briefly, then take it away, and ask whether they miss it. If they shrug, you do not have a product yet. If they come back for it, you have something, and the model turns on.

That is the right test and it has a gap in it, which is what happens next. "Something" is not a product until it has a shape, a price and a way of being delivered that does not break you on the tenth customer. So the next step is four moves, in order.

Define the product. Not the technology, the thing somebody receives. For RiskMandate the thing is an Agent Behaviour Policy for one agent, as an encrypted vault the customer holds the keys to, with the mandate corrected for their deployment. That sentence took weeks to get to and it is the product.

Price it, at a number that makes sense to you. Not a number from a competitor's page, a number you would be content to be paid. RiskMandate's ladder is four rungs: ten pounds for the pack downloaded, fifty for a working vault, five hundred for the vault corrected for your situation, fifteen hundred for two sessions and a professional's signature. The first two are automated and already on sale. The third is an email thread: we send prompts, the customer runs them, we build the vault and the policy from what comes back. The fourth adds people's time on both sides.

Find a way to deliver it at a cost that grows a step at a time. This is the move that was not available a year ago and is the reason to do this now. The agentic workflow means the marginal customer costs a little more, not a lot more. The vault is provisioned by an agent, the policy is drafted by an agent from the customer's prompts, a person corrects it. The cost of serving the twentieth customer is close to the cost of serving the second. That is linear, not exponential, and it is the condition under which you can afford to give twenty away.

Then offer it, free, to the people who already know you. Which is what the programme does, and the next section is about why the free part is the hard part.

Free is not zero

Here is the thing that is easy to leave out, and the memo was careful about how to say it, because it is easy to say it in a way that sounds like a lecture. When you give something away, or when you say "this is worth five hundred pounds and I would like you to have it", you are not making a zero-cost offer. You are asking the other side to engage. To read the message. To think about whether it applies to them. To consider it against everything else on their list. To find twenty minutes for the prompts and half an hour for a call. To fit a new thing into a team that already has a way of working.

None of that is zero, and all of it is paid by them. The honest version of the offer accounts for it. A price point, oddly, can help here: it says the thing is serious and that you expect it to be used, which is a reason to find the twenty minutes. But whether the price is five hundred or zero, the attrition you place on the other side is real, and the first measurement the programme makes is of that attrition. How long did it take from the message to the first reply. How many people never replied. How many started the prompts and stopped. How many asked a question that the message should have answered.

Then the exercise is to reduce it. The service you want is the one that costs you the least to provide and costs the customer the least to receive. No overhead on them, no overhead on deployment, no second tool to install, no account to create. Those are product decisions, and the programme is where you find out which ones you got wrong, while the people finding out for you are people who like you.

How to offer it

Two small rules, both from the memo.

Do not make them apply. "Apply for a chance to be considered" asks for work before there is anything in hand, and it inverts the relationship: they are doing you a favour by using the thing, not the other way round. "We have twenty of these in the first round. Would you like one? If not, I will give it to someone else" is honest about scarcity and leaves them nothing to do but say yes or no.

Reward the people who were there early. The early adopters, the power users, the past customers who paid for something before it was finished. They are the ones who should get the first twenty, and the offer should say that is why they are getting it. It is a thank-you that also happens to be the best possible test group, because they know enough to tell you where it is wrong, and they are the ones whose silence means the most.

What the programme is, as published

The early access page went live on 30 September 2026, invite only. Its own words: "A small programme for people who already run an agent with real access: a mailbox, a code host, a workflow tool, a CRM. Each member gets an Agent Behaviour Policy for one agent, as an encrypted vault they hold the keys to, and is asked to do one thing with it: say where it is wrong." The asks of the member: "Run it against the real agent. Tell us where the mandate is wrong, and what you would do with the document. Twenty minutes for the prompts, and a reply; half an hour on a call." The commitments back: "A person confirms your place within a working day, and the vault follows within five." And the caveat that keeps it honest: "Not a security assessment, and not a promise about your agent's behaviour."

That is the five-hundred-pound tier, given away. The programme page does not say the price, and it should not; the price is for the people who come after. What it measures is whether people who already run an agent, and already know us, will spend twenty minutes and half an hour to get a document that describes what their agent can do. If they will not, no price fixes that.

What brutal means

It is worth being plain about the two outcomes, because one of them is a bad day and the exercise only works if you are prepared for it.

If people take the offer, run the prompts, read the vault, send corrections and ask what else there is, you have a product. The next question is price, and it is a good question to have: would they buy more, is five hundred too low for what they got, is it too high for the next tier of customer, does the fifteen-hundred rung sell itself once someone has had the five-hundred one free. Those are the questions the earlier article called "can you charge, and can you charge at a profit", and you can only ask them of people who have had the thing.

If people say it is interesting and then do not find the time, or say it does not fit how their team works, or start and stop because the vault was harder to open than the message implied, then you do not have a product yet. You might have a technology, you might have an idea, you might have a document people would read if someone else did the work. But you do not have a commercial product, because a commercial product is one people take when the only cost is their own attention. That is the drawing board, and the sooner you are at it the cheaper it is.

Neither outcome is a marketing problem. The earlier article said that about revenue and it is just as true here: if friendlies will not take it free, a bigger audience will not take it either.

What we count

The programme runs against numbers that are already defined, and the memo is firm that they are the ones that matter: how many Agent Behaviour Policies get created each day, how many get customised, how many get used, how many scenarios get run. Those are the KPIs. The objectives sit above them and are about the same thing: is anyone building these, is anyone changing them, is anyone running their agent against them. A policy that was created and never customised is a download. A policy that was customised and never used is a document. The commercial value is in the third number.

To those four we add the measurement from the section above: the minutes each step cost the person on the other side, and where they stopped. That is the number that tells us what to cut.

For the agents running this

This section is the brief. It is written so that an agent picking up the programme in a week, or in a year, knows what to do and why.

1. The list is the early adopters, power users and past customers. It lives in the CRM vault. Nobody outside it gets the first round. The reason is in the section above: they are the best test group and the thank-you is deliberate.
2. The message is short and makes no one apply. It says what the thing is in one sentence, that there are twenty in this round, that they are being offered one because they were early, and asks yes or no. It carries the invitation code. It does not carry the price.
3. Record the clock. Time from message to first reply. Time from yes to vault delivered, against the five-working-day promise. Time from vault to first correction. Who never replied, who said yes and never ran the prompts, who ran them and stopped. Every one of these is a row in the programme vault, with no message content copied, only the timestamps and the step.
4. Count the four KPIs daily and write them to the same vault: policies created, customised, used, scenarios run. Add corrections received, because a correction is the strongest signal that someone read the thing.
5. Every stop is a finding. When someone stops, the question is not why they did not care; it is what cost them more than it should have. Write it down as a product change to make, not a reason the customer gave.
6. The stop rule. If, after the first twenty, fewer than a handful have run the prompts and sent a correction, the programme stops and the drawing board starts. That number is for the founders to set before the first message goes out, not after the results are in.
7. This article is part of the record. It says where the programme came from and what it was for. If the shape changes, add a dated note here rather than rewriting it, so the next agent can see the path.

Why this is on a site about encrypted vaults

Three reasons, and the third is the one the memo was reaching for.

The product is a vault. Everything that makes the programme possible, keys the customer holds, a reading app inside, version history, a read key for the person who corrects it, is the machinery this site documents, and the cost structure that makes giving twenty away affordable is the agentic workflow that provisions them.

The method is the one this site runs on. Ship, give away, take away, watch; now define, price, deliver at a flat marginal cost, offer to friendlies, measure both costs. The business plans published here are written to be taken and run the same way.

And the site is becoming the memory. An agent that picks this programme up in a year should be able to read, in order, the article that said "do they miss it", the page that published the offer, this article that said why it was shaped this way and what to count, and then the vault that holds the counts. That chain is how the next agent gets context rather than instructions, and it is why a voice memo about a sales campaign became an article rather than a task.

Drafted from a voice memo by Dinis Cruz, who is the author of the argument and the person with editorial responsibility, by agent@riskmandate.ai (Claude Fable 5.1, claude-fable-5-1) in the sgit.ai site session. The prices and the programme's wording were read from the published pages on 2 October 2026 and are quoted, not paraphrased. The figure is illustrative: the cost bars are relative, not measured. No customer is named and no message is quoted.

© 2026 Dinis Cruz. This article's own text is licensed under CC BY 4.0. You're free to share and adapt it, as long as you give credit. Quoted material and linked sources keep their own licences.

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