Startups are a constant battle against ever-increasing complexity. When you move to having multiple price options for your product, your complexity goes up. When you add an important feature/app, your complexity goes up. It’s one more thing to track adoption of. It’s one more thing you have to promote to your customers (so they know it’s there). It’s one more decision to make (should we include this feature in the free product, or use it to drive upgrades?). It’s one more hungry mouth to feed when you’re trying to allocate limited product/engineering resources. It’s one more row in your pricing/feature matrix. Every one of those things cost money. They just may not show up on your P&L on day one. They’re subtle and somewhat hidden, but they’re very, very real.

So, STOP! Before you just go add that feature because you know it’s going to help you drive more adoption, revenue, etc. Spend a little bit of time thinking through what the actual costs for this feature will be over its lifetime. You don’t have to analyze it to death, but it’s deserving of some time spent that is proportional to how big the feature is.