consulting pays $6.2k a month, the product makes $210 - how do people actually taper without falling off a cliff

Raised rates. That's the whole strategy and it's the one nobody wants to hear. Went from hourly to a fixed monthly fee for a defined scope, roughly 40% more money for about 60% of the hours, and one of the two clients said no. The one who said yes is the one I still work with four years later.

That freed a day and a half a week, and a day and a half is a completely different animal from six evening hours. You can do sales calls, you can answer support during business hours, you can think. Evenings are for code. Days are for the business.

Set a floor and a date and make them boring. Mine was: I go part-time on services when the product covers my fixed personal costs for three consecutive months, and I stop entirely when it covers those plus 30%. Writing the number down mattered more than the number itself, because $210 to $6,200 feels impossible and $210 to $2,400 is a target.

Also: 14 customers at $15 average is a pricing statement as much as a growth statement. Doubling the price with 14 customers is a much shorter path to $2,400 than getting to 160 customers at the current price, and you'll lose fewer of them than you fear.

Don't drop a client without a date and a number written down first. You'll fill the free time with product work that doesn't compound and then panic in month three.

Pushing back on the framing that consulting is the obstacle. It's the reason your product exists and it's your best source of customers. The people who cross successfully usually don't taper - they change what the consulting is. Stop selling hours and start selling implementations of your own product at a high price. Same clients, same skill, but now every engagement makes the product better and creates a reference.

The failure mode I've watched several people hit is quitting services entirely at $2k MRR and then spending a year doing panic freelancing at worse rates than before.

Nine months into the same situation so no crossing story yet, but one thing helped more than expected: I moved all client work onto three fixed days and made those days genuinely unavailable for the product, and the other two genuinely unavailable for clients.

Before that, everything bled into everything and I did about four real hours of product work a week while feeling busy constantly. Same total hours, roughly triple the output, and the clients haven't noticed or cared which days I work.