After launching Fwd:Vault last month, it’s been a race to add the necessary features and functions to take the service broader. First on the list was more subscription tiers. I launched with just two: free and “unlimited everything.” I did this because, well, it was easy.

Your instinct may be to dismiss my decision as laziness, but hear me out. I built most of the base site with just 1 state: free (remember that unlimited free beta period last year?). That allowed me to — rightly — focus purely on features, functions, bugs, etc. Dealing with subscription tiers at the same time would have clouded everything, slowing everything down and likely leading to more rewriting. Staying focused allowed me to get the cornerstone stuff right before building on top of it.

I applied the same thought process when it came time to offer paid options. The game plan has always been to have three paid options, plus the free account. However instead of initially coding four possible user states, I started with just two: free or paid.

This makes my job as a developer much more focused. There’s a LOT of logic in a service like Fwd:Vault focused explicitly on subscriptions: access permissions, showing/hiding upgrade options, setting quota restrictions, security checks to prevent hackarounds from unscrupulous users. The functionality of almost every page is affected by the user’s free/paying status, and don’t even get me started on the work it takes to process credit cards. You have to be doubly triply careful when dealing with people’s personal data like that. On and on. Getting the basics in place takes a lot of forethought and coding.

So instead of thinking about all this stuff in four dimensions — free, option 1, option 2, option 3 — I can cover most everything in just two — free or paid — and then come back later to fill in the holes for the other tiers.

Complexity is your enemy as a developer. Each task must be as tightly focused as possible. The tighter your focus, the less chance you’ll have to introduce bugs. Adding more later may require rewrites, but they are far far easier than rewriting the big sloppy mess you get when biting off more than you can chew.

With the basic subscription and tier logic in place, it’s a far simpler matter to expand the options out to infinity (though we’ll start with four). Expect to see the new pricing options in a few weeks.

Looking for more to read? There’s a new post on the Fwd:Vault Blog that details the most unobtrusive disk defragmenting process I’ve seen (that I also use for my own systems).