Why We Picked $5

There’s a version of this project where we charged more.

We could have charged what the market would bear. We could have positioned these addresses as premium digital assets, leaned into the scarcity angle, priced them at what a domain name costs on a good registrar in a good year — or higher. We had the infrastructure. We had the addresses. Nobody was going to stop us.

We didn’t do that.

We charged five dollars. Once. No renewal. No annual fee. No expiry. Five dollars and the address is yours forever.

This post is about why. Not the spreadsheet reason. Not the growth-hacking reason. The actual reason — the one we kept coming back to every time someone asked us whether we’d left money on the table.

We hadn’t left money on the table. We’d put something more important there instead.

The Question Behind the Price

Before you can understand why we picked five dollars, you have to understand the question we were actually trying to answer.

The question wasn’t: what can we charge?

The question was: who are we doing this for?

Because those two questions produce completely different numbers. The first question sends you to a competitor analysis, a willingness-to-pay survey, a tiered pricing model, a freemium funnel. The second question sends you somewhere else entirely. It sends you to a kitchen table in Ipswich, a unit in Cairns, a share house on the Gold Coast, a farm outside Toowoomba. It sends you to the Queenslander who has never thought about owning a piece of the digital world because nothing in the digital world has ever felt like it was built for them.

That’s the question we were trying to answer. And once we were honest about it, the price almost answered itself.

What a Price Communicates Before Anyone Reads a Word

Pricing is a language. Long before someone reads your about page or your mission statement or your blog post explaining your philosophy, they’ve already received a very clear message from the number you put next to your product.

A high price says: this is for people who’ve already made it.

A free price says: you are the product.

A five-dollar price says something different. It says: we want you here, and we’re serious about that.

It says we’re not giving this away because we have another plan for monetising your attention. It says we’re not pricing it out of reach because we think scarcity creates value. It says we thought about who we wanted in this thing, and we set the price to match that intention.

Five dollars is below the threshold of anxiety. It’s below the threshold where someone pauses and thinks: can I afford this? For most Queenslanders, five dollars is not a financial decision. It’s barely a decision at all. It’s a coffee. It’s a decision you make in thirty seconds and don’t think about again.

That’s deliberate.

We wanted the price to get out of the way. We wanted the question a Queenslander asks themselves to be: do I want a permanent address that’s mine forever? Not: can I afford this? Not: is this worth the money? Not: maybe I’ll come back when I have a bit more spare cash.

The price had to be low enough to make those latter questions irrelevant. And for us, five dollars did that.

The Meaning of Permanent, and What It Demands of Price

We need to talk about what we actually built before we can fully explain why we priced it the way we did.

These aren’t domain names in any traditional sense. They don’t expire. They don’t renew. There is no annual fee because there is no annual anything — once you own one, it exists on chain permanently. The address is yours until you decide to do something else with it, and even then, that’s your choice to make.

This is genuinely different from how digital addresses have worked for the last three decades. The traditional domain name model is a rental model dressed up as ownership. You pay every year. You forget to renew, you lose it. The registry decides the rules. The registry can change the rules. Your address exists at the pleasure of a company, which exists at the pleasure of its shareholders, which exists at the pleasure of quarterly earnings targets.

We built the opposite of that. We built something that is actually, genuinely, permanentlyowned — not licensed, not rented, not held in trust on your behalf by a company that reserves the right to change the terms.

When something is permanent, the relationship between price and product changes fundamentally. With a recurring subscription, a high price is at least theoretically justified because you’re paying for ongoing service, ongoing maintenance, ongoing infrastructure. You can point to the ongoing costs and say: that’s where your money goes.

With a one-time permanent price, there’s nowhere to hide. The price is just the price. And so the price has to reflect your values directly, without the softening effect of “we need to cover our ongoing costs.”

We looked at a permanent, one-time price of five dollars and we asked: does this say what we believe?

Yes. It does.

It says we believe Queenslanders should own their digital addresses the same way they own their homes — outright, permanently, without a landlord who can raise the rent or change the locks. It says we believe access to that ownership shouldn’t be contingent on income. It says we believe the permanence of the address should be matched by a price that doesn’t require you to keep justifying the purchase over time.

Five dollars. Once. That’s it.

Accessibility Is a Value, Not a Feature

We want to be careful here, because “accessibility” is a word that gets used a lot in product and tech spaces, usually to mean something fairly narrow — screen readers, colour contrast ratios, keyboard navigation. Those things matter, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

We’re talking about accessibility in the older, broader sense. The sense that asks: who can walk through this door?

Queensland is not a monolith. It is the most geographically diverse state in Australia. It contains some of the wealthiest suburbs in the country and some of the most economically marginalised communities on the continent. It contains retirees and teenagers and farmers and fishermen and tech workers and nurses and people who have never thought about blockchain in their lives and people who have thought about little else. It contains people for whom five dollars is genuinely not nothing — not a coffee they’d skip without thinking about it, but a real, considered expenditure.

We thought about those people. We thought about them a lot.

If we priced these addresses at fifty dollars, we’d be making a quiet but unmistakeable statement: this is for the comfortable. If we priced them at twenty dollars, same thing, softer. If we priced them at ten dollars, we were getting closer to something, but still not quite there.

Five dollars felt like the number that crossed the line. The line where the price stops being a filter that excludes people based on their financial situation and becomes something that almost anyone can access if they want to.

And that mattered to us enormously. Because here is the thing about building something that’s meant to give every Queenslander a permanent digital home: if it’s not accessible to every Queenslander, you haven’t built what you said you were building. You’ve built something for some Queenslanders — the ones who can afford it, the ones who are comfortable, the ones who already have a certain kind of access to the digital economy.

That’s not the project. That was never the project.

The project is for all of them. For the surfer in Surfers Paradise who thinks tech stuff is not really for him. For the farmer outside Longreach who has a slow internet connection and a smart phone and more identity tied to her patch of Queensland soil than any URL could capture but who deserves a permanent digital address just the same. For the kid in Logan who is incredibly online, incredibly smart, and for whom the concept of owning something permanent on a blockchain might actually be the most natural thing in the world — but for whom every dollar counts.

Five dollars. We wanted them all to be able to say yes.

Seriousness Is Not Signalled by Expense

There’s a belief in product and branding circles that price signals quality. That cheap means disposable, and expensive means serious. That if you want people to treat your product with respect, you should charge enough that they have skin in the game.

We understand where that thinking comes from. In some contexts, it’s even true. But we think it’s deeply wrong in this one.

Here’s why.

The permanence and seriousness of what we’ve built is not communicated by the price. It’s communicated by the architecture. It’s communicated by the fact that these addresses exist on-chain and cannot be taken away from you. It’s communicated by the fact that there is no renewal process, no account you have to maintain in good standing, no terms of service that can be updated to include a clause that voids your ownership under certain conditions.

The seriousness is in the thing itself, not in what you paid for it.

We believe that when you own one of these addresses, you will understand its seriousness the moment you understand what it actually is. You don’t need to have paid a premium price for that understanding to arrive. You need to understand that this is permanent. That no one can take it. That it’s yours in a way that almost nothing digital has ever been yours before.

That’s the seriousness we wanted to communicate. And we didn’t need to charge three hundred dollars to communicate it. We needed to build something that was actually permanent. Which we did.

There’s another dimension to this as well. When we set a high price, we are implicitly saying: the people who paid less didn’t value this as much. We didn’t want to build a tiered sense of belonging. We didn’t want the person who scraped together five dollars to feel like they were on the budget tier while someone else was on the premium tier. There is no premium tier. There is one tier. It costs five dollars. Everyone who owns a Queensland address owns it the same way, with the same permanence, the same rights, the same immutability.

Price parity across all buyers is part of the equality we were trying to build into this project from the ground up.

The Annual Fee Is the Thing We Most Wanted to Destroy

If we’re being honest — and this is a values post, so we should be — the thing that motivated us most strongly wasn’t the one-time price. It was the absence of an annual fee.

Annual fees are how the traditional domain industry extracts ongoing value from people who already own something. They are the mechanism by which “ownership” is quietly converted into “rental.” They are the reason people lose addresses they’ve had for years because they forgot to update their credit card details. They are the reason digital addresses feel impermanent, contingent, and a little bit stressful.

We have all experienced this. We’ve all had the moment where you realise a domain you cared about has lapsed because the email went to your spam folder. Or the moment where you decide not to renew something because the annual fee crept up again and you’re questioning whether it’s worth it. Or the moment where you discover that a domain you thought you owned has been snapped up by a squatter and is now listed for twenty times what you originally paid.

These experiences are not accidents. They are features of a system that profits from impermanence. A system that has a financial incentive to make your ownership feel conditional, because conditional ownership is ownership you have to keep paying for.

We wanted to build the opposite of that. We wanted to build something where the moment you pay five dollars, you can genuinely, completely stop worrying about it. You don’t need a calendar reminder. You don’t need an auto-renewal set up. You don’t need to check your email for a renewal notice. You don’t need to worry about what happens if the company behind this changes its pricing model in five years.

The address is yours. Full stop. Not yours-for-now. Not yours-as-long-as-you-keep-paying. Yours.

And we wanted that to be true for everyone, regardless of what their bank account looks like in three years or five years or twenty years. The farmer in Longreach shouldn’t have to worry about whether her Queensland address is going to lapse during a rough year. The retiree in Caloundra shouldn’t have to remember to renew his address when he’s eighty. The kid in Logan shouldn’t look at her address in a decade and wonder whether she can still afford to keep it.

No annual fee means no one gets priced out over time. No annual fee means the promise of permanence is actually kept. No annual fee is part of how we matched our infrastructure to our values — and five dollars, paid once, is what makes that model coherent.

The Relationship Between Price and Mission

Here’s the cleanest way we know how to say it.

Our mission is to give every Queenslander a permanent digital home.

Every Queenslander. Not most Queenslanders. Not Queenslanders who can afford it. Not Queenslanders who are interested in blockchain. Every one of them.

If that’s the mission — and it is — then the price has to serve that mission. The price cannot be a barrier to the mission. The price cannot be the thing that stands between a Queenslander and their address.

This is actually a fairly simple logical chain, but it has a real consequence: it puts a ceiling on what we could charge. Not a floor — we weren’t going to give these away for free, for reasons we’ll get to — but a ceiling. A point above which the price begins to contradict the mission.

We thought hard about where that ceiling was. We went back and forth. We tested numbers against the question: would this stop someone? Not the average person, not the median Queenslander, but the person for whom this purchase is genuinely a stretch. The person who thinks about every five-dollar decision.

And we kept arriving back at five.

Not because it’s a magic number. Not because of research or data. Because when we sat with the question honestly — when we asked ourselves who we were afraid of leaving behind — five dollars felt like the number that kept the door open for them. Just barely, in some cases. But open.

Why Not Free?

The question worth asking here is: if accessibility is so important, why not make it free?

It’s a fair question. And we want to answer it genuinely, not defensively.

Free has a cost. Not to the person receiving it — to the project itself. A free model has to sustain itself some other way. It has to find revenue elsewhere. It has to make money from attention, from data, from advertising, from a premium tier, from something. And the thing free models make money from is almost always the users themselves, in one form or another.

We didn’t want that relationship. We didn’t want to be in the business of monetising Queenslanders’ attention or data. We didn’t want to build a model where the product is free and you are the product. That model is incompatible with what we were building — permanent, immutable, user-owned addresses — because the moment your business model depends on exploiting user data or attention, the user’s interests and your interests diverge.

We wanted aligned interests. We wanted to be paid once, fairly, and then to have exactly zero ongoing financial incentive to do anything except honour the permanence of what we sold.

A five-dollar price does that. It creates a clean, honest transaction. You pay us five dollars. We give you a permanent address. The transaction is complete. We owe you the permanence we promised. You owe us nothing further.

That’s a relationship we could feel good about. That’s a relationship we could build on.

Free also, frankly, communicates the wrong thing about permanence. If something costs nothing, it’s easy to treat it as disposable — something you pick up and put down, something you might come back to, something that doesn’t quite feel real. We wanted these addresses to feel real. We wanted them to feel like something you own, something you made a decision to acquire, something with a small but genuine weight to it.

Five dollars creates that weight without creating a burden. It’s enough to feel like a decision. Not so much that the decision requires serious deliberation.

The Long Tail of Accessibility

We want to say one more thing about price and accessibility, because we think it’s important and we haven’t seen it said often enough.

Accessibility isn’t just about the upfront cost. It’s about what the price communicates to people who weren’t going to buy anyway — people who look at a product and decide, before they’ve even engaged with it, that it’s not for them.

There is a large population of Queenslanders who have been quietly excluded from the digital economy their entire lives. Not because they’re not smart, not because they’re not interested, but because almost everything in the digital economy has been built by people in Sydney or San Francisco for people who are already comfortable and connected. The price points, the language, the assumptions about existing infrastructure and digital literacy — all of it has been calibrated for an audience that doesn’t include everyone.

We know that a five-dollar price tag doesn’t fix this on its own. We know that owning a Queensland address requires a level of digital engagement that not every Queenslander has yet. We’re not naive about that.

But we also know that price is the most visible signal a product sends about who it’s for. And we wanted every Queenslander who saw the price to have one fewer reason to conclude that this wasn’t for them.

Five dollars says: come and look. It says: we’re not asking you to bet your household budget on this. It says: we built this with you in mind.

That’s the message we wanted to send. And the price is how we sent it.

Building Something We Could Be Proud Of

There’s a final thing we want to say, and it’s probably the most personal.

We could have built a product that made more money. We want to be clear about that, because we don’t want this post to sound like we’re pretending the economics didn’t matter or that the choice to charge five dollars was easy or costless. It wasn’t. We thought about it seriously. We argued about it. We ran the numbers and looked at what different price points would mean for the project.

We chose five dollars anyway.

Because when we imagined the version of this project where we charged more — where we priced it like a premium digital asset, where we positioned it for the blockchain-curious and the early adopters and the people who had money to spend on digital novelties — we felt something go out of it. Some essential thing that was supposed to be at the centre of the project got pushed aside.

We didn’t build Queensland Foundation to create a premium digital asset class for people who are already comfortable online. We built it because we believe Queenslanders deserve a permanent place in the digital world. All of them. Not just the ones who can pay for it.

And a project that believes that has to price itself to prove it.

Five dollars. Once. No renewals. No expiry. No annual fees. Yours forever.

That’s not just a price. It’s a position. It’s a statement about what we think the digital economy owes to the people who live in it. It’s a commitment, made in numbers rather than words, that we built this for Queensland — the whole of it, all the way out to the edges, all the way back to the people who have been standing outside the digital economy wondering if anyone was ever going to build something with them in mind.

We did. And we priced it so they’d know it.

We didn’t arrive at five dollars by running a pricing model.

We arrived at it by asking what we actually believed, and then building a price that matched.

That’s the whole story. That’s why we picked five dollars.