A platform whose value comes from what its users have already built into it holds a strange kind of pricing power. Every hour a developer spends learning the tools, every plugin bought, every shipped title that still needs patching, raises the cost of leaving. That accumulated investment reads on a spreadsheet as pricing headroom, because the alternative now carries a migration bill. The mistake is treating headroom as though it were the same in every direction.

Unity tested that in September 2023, announcing a Runtime Fee that charged studios for installs of their games. The number itself was survivable for most of them. What was not survivable was the direction it pointed: the fee applied to titles that had already been designed, budgeted, and released under different terms, so the studios that had committed hardest to Unity carried the largest new liability. Developers who had spent years accumulating switching costs found those costs repriced without their consent. The backlash was immediate and public, studios announced they would move to other engines, and Unity apologized and rewrote the policy inside of two weeks. The fee was cancelled outright the following year.

The lesson is not that price increases cost you customers. It is that a price change reaching backwards converts sunk investment from something that holds people in place into something they resent having made. Subscriptions that raise rates prospectively survive this routinely, because each member re-decides at renewal with full information and nothing already settled is reopened. The same magnitude applied retroactively lands as a broken deal, and it lands hardest on the users most committed to you.