Ads are hard to get a decent return unless you have hundreds of thousands of visitors. I, myself, hardly like to pay for anything, and love free products, however, I've recently tried to figure out a pricing plan that
I personally would pay for.. and use that mentality to price my products, which are often far cheaper than the average, but still enough to profit.
My pricing is based on two audiences: individual and small business.
I assume if I were to ever get a big business, they could always register for multiple accounts.
So this is how I normally create and price:
I offer a "free version" of all my products that have X amount of whatever I am offering, usually around 5 or 10 for the month.
Each time the product is used, X amount drops until it hits 0, at which point, the user cannot use the product any more. If they need more X, however, they may purchase more X.
For a few products I wrote (still in beta), it is subscription-based where they hop on a plan that gives them X a month. There are variations of the plan that offer a certain amount of X depending on how much they need. If they use more than that, they can either upgrade their plan OR purchase more of X outright.
On their renew date (each month from which they subscribed to the plan), the number of X restores back to that amount.
On my non-subscription based products, I offer X amount and they can use it all up and purchase more whenever they need more, or just wait until the renew date from which they registered, which restores their account balance to whatever X amount is the default.
That has been my pricing method. I can't give you numbers yet on whether it works, as I've just begun my journey into charging for the things I create, but I just think: How much I pay for this?
Things that cost $50 a month? As an individual person, unless they were really useful, probably not.
Things that cost $1.99, $2.99, $3.99, $4.99, $5.99 or $9.99 a month? Probably more reasonable for an individual.
As for being a startup or small business? $49.99 or $99.99 is certainly a reasonable price.
Curious about .95 or .99 pricing? Basic psychology: You are technically getting the extra dollar, but in the mind of your consumer: they are not giving you that extra dollar.