I have been reading Eric Ries's new book, Incorruptible, while building Achene. It keeps putting words to things I have felt for years.
Ries wrote The Lean Startup, so he knows how companies get built.
His new question is why good companies go bad. His answer is not what I expected. It is mostly not that bad people take over. It is that success creates what he calls "financial gravity": the pull of investors, boards and growth targets toward short-term, extractive decisions. Even principled founders feel it. Unless the structure of the company resists it, it usually wins.
That matches what I have watched happen to the tools teachers rely on.
What happened to teaching platforms
Teachers have had a rough couple of years with their platforms.
Across the industry, the pattern has been remarkably consistent.
One major platform restructured its plans and shifted entry-level teachers from a $39 plan onto a $69 plan, a 77% overnight increase, while introducing a 7.5% cut on every sale for its base tier.
Another raised its core monthly plans by 20% to 25%, taking entry tiers from $149 to $179 and mid tiers up to $249, while quietly shelving its affordable starter option.
Across other market leaders, standard plans have crept up by 10% or more, and long-standing free tiers have quietly vanished.
None of these companies are villains. Each price change probably has a sensible internal reason.
That is Ries's point. Gravity does not need villains. A platform grows, investors expect more revenue per customer, and the easiest lever is to charge the people who cannot easily leave. Move a feature up a tier, cap the contacts, add a fee. Each step looks reasonable.
After a few years, a tutor with a few hundred students is paying for software built for a business ten times their size.
What I want Achene to do differently
I started Achene because I wanted a platform built for the independent teacher: the language tutor, the hobbyist instructor, the retired professional teaching one subject they love. Fair pricing is the heart of it, and it follows a few rules.
Students are never capped. Students sitting in a database cost almost nothing. Capping them punishes a teacher for succeeding and pushes them to delete past students to keep their bill down. We charge for what actually costs money: storage and email.
Bandwidth is unlimited. Video delivery used to be the cost that drove metered plans. Our videos are stored on Cloudflare R2, which does not charge for egress, so we do not meter how much your students watch.
Core features are not held back. Forums, the CRM, email broadcasts and automations, analytics, custom domains, authoring tools and payments are on every plan. The tiers differ by how much storage and email you need, not by which tools you are allowed to use.
Pricing is linear. A bigger plan gets you proportionally more, not a worse deal per pound. Our three plans are Seed at £10/$14 a month, Taking Root at £50/$70 and Thriving at £100/$140. There are no sudden jumps and no surprise bills. If you pass an allowance, we warn you at 80% and we never cut off a sequence of emails halfway through.
We do not take a cut of your sales. You pay Stripe's processing fee and nothing more to us. Our income comes from subscriptions, so we only do well when teachers find the platform worth paying for.
What profit leaves out
One idea in the book has stayed with me more than any other. Ries asks us to look beyond the profit and loss account and count the externalities too: the good and the harm a company creates that never shows up on its own books. The harm a company does is a cost, even if someone else is the one paying it. The good it does is a profit, even if it never reaches the bank account. Count both, and the usual labels stop making sense. A charity that makes a big positive difference to people's lives is, in that fuller sense, making a huge profit. A company like a tobacco maker can post healthy profits and still be running at a net loss once the damage it causes is counted.
I think about that every time I make a decision for Achene. A platform can post healthy margins and still be taking something from the teachers and students it serves, or from the planet that powers it. I want the whole ledger to be positive, not just my own.
Cheaper to run, kinder to the planet
All of Achene's hosting, storage and video delivery runs on Cloudflare. Email goes through Resend and payments through Stripe.
Cloudflare's serverless platform only uses compute when someone is actually using it, rather than keeping servers idling around the clock. That is part of why we can offer more for less. It is also better for the environment, because idle machines still use power.
Cloudflare says it matches its electricity use with 100% renewable energy. To be precise about that: it does this with purchased certificates rather than direct supply, and it acknowledges some hours in some places will still produce emissions. It also reports having offset its historical network emissions in 2025. That is still better than most alternatives, but I would rather you hear the careful version from me.
Externalities matter to me. When a company pushes its costs onto someone else, whether that is the customer, the community or the planet, it is already drifting. I want Achene to take responsibility for its own footprint, and I will keep reporting on it honestly.
Intentions are not enough
Here is the uncomfortable part. Everything above is a promise, and promises are exactly what Ries says do not survive financial gravity. A founder who means well today can be replaced, outvoted or pressured by investors tomorrow.
Achene has not taken any outside investments, and we're not intending on doing so. We have however, also not put our business structure in place yet.
We plan to follow the structure Ries outlines in the book, which is designed to lock the mission in so it cannot quietly be traded away later. I will write more about what that means for us as we do it, including the parts that are hard.
For now, I would rather say it plainly: I am not asking you to trust my good intentions. I am building the company so that you do not have to.
If you teach, and you are tired of watching your platform get more expensive and less fair every year, come and plant a seed with us.
Pete Stewart, Achene Tech Founder