I hadn’t realized earlier that you’re the founder of Write.as. I completely get the cost factors for small, bootstrapped platforms and also how larger players can have loss leaders in their offerings. Pricing is experimental, in my view. A seller ought to try different pricing to capture more income from different segments of users who have different valuations and needs (this may not be very easy to do).

In the case of Write.as, I see some points that seem weird to me.

One is the character limit in the pricing tables. I don’t know if anyone is going to look at that and decide which option to go for. The 100000 character limit in the lowest tier would probably be around 15000 words or so. That’s a very high limit for most blog posts, and is in the long form article territory. So I don’t think that anyone looking only at character count for a blog would need anything more.

The other part is not having a price tier between $12 a year and $60 a year. That’s a big gap if you’re focusing on personal blogs.

Lastly, on the point of the gym membership comparison, I’ve heard this logic of commitment being tied to loss aversion. But I’ve practically seen it work badly (not as expected at all), and resulting in more loss aversion that prevents people from signing up for anything with a larger commitment next time. That’s just been my observation.