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Ask HN: What payment model should I adopt for my new site?

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Re: Ask HN: What payment model should I adopt for my new site?

#21
When we launched our commercial SaaS, we initially offered an annual payment only, but ended up adding monthly options in response to user requests. Students, in particular, wanted a monthly option, so you might want to keep in mind the age demographic of your users.

The monthly was priced so the annual provided a 17% discount. At first, the split was 1/3 annual and 2/3 monthly, but this migrated over the past year to the current 50-50 (we expect this to revert back to the 1/3-2/3 split once the schools fire back up).

In the meantime, we added two other offerings, one of which was a set of virtual goods that could be bought separately or as a bundle, and the other were add-ons that augment the basic desktop app. These are one time purchases.

The combination of offering both subscription based services and one off purchases has worked well, with each model generating 1/3 of our revenue (the other 1/3 comes from a mobile app).

We often see users tip their toes in to the water by buying one of the lower cost "one off" items, and then come back later to buy more and sign up for the subscription service. Having a low cost item for sale seems to provide a mechanism for the buyer to check out the process before committing to a larger and/or repeating purchase.

Re: Ask HN: What payment model should I adopt for my new site?

#22
Totally depends on: a) what kind of product/service you are offering. b) who your target market is.

Some things I like to pay one-off for. Others I go monthly. I find the monthly services tend to update and add features more often than the one-offs. I also tend to see that the monthly subscription services provide ever increasing value to me. Maybe that is because they are "works in progress" in constant competition and know that should they fail they will start bleeding customers to the competition. Also, with one-offs I often find that the cost is high enough to make me seriously consider a purchase and I spend more time seeking out the competition.

Some examples: Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice or Google Docs. Outlook vs Thunderbird. Vimeo vs Youtube.

Oops... those examples all point towards free alternatives. Hope your product has some killer advantage that can overcome any existing competition that goes freemium. Else you better try the freemium model yourself. We live in an age where everyone wants everything for free.

Re: Ask HN: What payment model should I adopt for my new site?

#23
post #7

>The first question is do users prefer to pay a one off fee >(even though that fee could be quite large) or do they >prefer to pay a set of smaller monthly fees? Some prefer one off fee. Some prefer paying in installments. You should offer both if you can. Monthly payments is better for long term cash flow management of your startup. But it comes with some admin hassle. Single large payments are better for the short…

What do you mean by "sticky" in this context?
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