Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Charge more for app subscriptions

mronge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 149 posts

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#41

Post by dsjoerg »

OJFord wrote: post #31
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not intended to be non-defeatable. It's intended to recognize enormous disparities in income worldwide (and sometimes even within the same city). The user/buyer who elects to use a one-time payment gets to pick their own price, too: the default is pre-seeded based on OECD data on the cost of a mid-prize restaurant meal for two without alcohol, combined with IP address. Our motto has been (thus far): it doesn't m…

I realise that, I meant that as the usual response that clearly doesn't apply to your case. What I'm not clear on is why you don't work out the correct region & pricing on the customer's behalf; why you leave it to honesty?

A hint towards their answer is when they said "(and sometimes even within the same city)". Because it's important to them to allow for non-location-based price adjustment, they simply leave it up to the user.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#42

Post by Valkhyr »

The way to fix app "subscriptions" is not to charge more (or less) but to fix the customer-hostile structure of app "subscriptions".

The big issue with app "subscriptions" is that they don't actually work like subscriptions.

Before the digital age, "subscription" used to mean (and for physical products it still means) that you get regular delivery of something as long as you pay. If you stop paying, you no longer get more stuff, but you get to keep whatever you already received. You don't have to return your back issues of the newspaper when you cancel your subscription. Arguably TV subscriptions have always been an exception, but functionally they're not because you can record TV.

App "subscriptions" are different. Developers like to emphasize how they fund sustained future development of an app, but the reality is that when you cancel you usually lose access even to current features (you arguably already helped pay for).

The way app subscriptions should work is that you can perpetually keep using whatever version of the app was current when you stopped paying (Jetbrains actually does this, and I salute them for it: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...).

The current model is really "app rental", and it's inherently customer-hostile. Playing with the pricing does not fundamentally change that.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#43

Post by jimkleiber »

jimkleiber wrote: post #30
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #9

This analysis is very US/Euro-centric. Bumping the price from US$20 to US$100 might indeed allow you to focus more on your most dedicated customers . It also bumps the price way above anything that billions of people around the world can pay for such a thing. At Ardour, we have 3 subscription price levels: Regular: US$10/month Low Cost: US$4/month Developing World: US$1/month We leave it to users to decide which cate…

I really appreciate this approach. I thought about charging a low rate of $1/month, but with Stripe processing fees of $0.30 + 2.9% and Memberful fees of 4.9%, I was going to be charged something like $0.38, leaving me $0.62 per $1.00 transaction. Have you found a way around this or just accepted the essentially 38% tax on those $1 monthly transactions?

UPDATE: The Ardour community says they use PayPal because of the micropayments rate [0], which PayPal says is 5% (6% for crossborder transactions) + $0.05 USD per transaction [1].

[0] https://community.ardour.org/about_subscriptions [1] https://www.paypal.com/gf/smarthelp/article/How-can-I-update...

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#44

Post by OJFord »

dsjoerg wrote: post #41
OJFord wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realise that, I meant that as the usual response that clearly doesn't apply to your case. What I'm not clear on is why you don't work out the correct region & pricing on the customer's behalf; why you leave it to honesty?

A hint towards their answer is when they said "(and sometimes even within the same city)". Because it's important to them to allow for non-location-based price adjustment, they simply leave it up to the user.

That makes sense as 'pay what you think it's worth'/'can afford', both of which I think I've seen, but a city isn't both 'developing world' and not based on individuals' income or whatever.

And now I quote that, is that the real wording? 'Regular' vs. 'developing world'? Idk, I won't speak for others, but I wouldn't phrase it like that myself.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#45

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

seanwilson wrote: post #32
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, most IP address detection mechanisms will place me in Albuquerque, NM. In reality, I'm about 70 miles from there. In the circle defined by that radius, there are families who barely earn $10k/yr and single individuals who earn millions per year. So IP address is not particularly useful in determining the "right price". That said, and as mentioned below, we do use IP address and OECD data on the cost of din…

Netflix, Adobe etc. would never be able to go with what's essentially a "pay what you like" or "pay what you claim you earn" subscription if that's what you're getting at. Isn't there something more practical than this?

If the goal is "never leave money on the table", your strategies will be very different than if you goal is "raise enough income to do something you want to do".

To whatever extent Netflix or Adobe are attached to the former goal, then certainly they are not going to offer pay-what-you-say-you-can.

Whether that's the best goal for them to have, either for themselves or for society at large, is an entirely different question.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#46

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

OJFord wrote: post #44
dsjoerg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hint towards their answer is when they said "(and sometimes even within the same city)". Because it's important to them to allow for non-location-based price adjustment, they simply leave it up to the user.

That makes sense as 'pay what you think it's worth'/'can afford', both of which I think I've seen, but a city isn't both 'developing world' and not based on individuals' income or whatever. And now I quote that, is that the real wording? 'Regular' vs. 'developing world'? Idk, I won't speak for others, but I wouldn't phrase it like that myself.

The wording thing is a fair point. I haven't noticed them juxtaposed in that way. Perhaps we'll change them to something less descriptive of the intended "audience". The "Low Cost" name does this at present. Thanks for pointing it out.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#47

Post by Kaze404 »

zepto wrote: post #27
Kaze404 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent never said that. Charging less helps with the goal of having a sustainable business that benefits as many people as possible because it lowers the barrier of entry.

Maybe, but it’s also possible that if you charge too little, people subscribe but don’t benefit, because they don’t use the service much. Subscribing doesn’t necessarily imply benefitting, but the higher the price, the more correlated these are likely to be.

If people don't use your product if they don't have the pressure of sunken cost, then maybe they're not really benefitting either way.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#48

Post by esperent »

Kaze404 wrote: post #22
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #9

This analysis is very US/Euro-centric. Bumping the price from US$20 to US$100 might indeed allow you to focus more on your most dedicated customers . It also bumps the price way above anything that billions of people around the world can pay for such a thing. At Ardour, we have 3 subscription price levels: Regular: US$10/month Low Cost: US$4/month Developing World: US$1/month We leave it to users to decide which cate…

This is incredible. Thank you for not forgetting about half the planet's population like most services do. I'd like to point out that https://sloppy.io (not sponsored) recently helped me out with regional pricing. On top of being a great service, I can tell the people running it actually care.

What does sloppy.io do? The site won't load for me.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#49

Post by esperent »

cercatrova wrote: post #5

I watched a very interesting video about selling to consumers as opposed to businesses [0]. The key takeaway is that consumers' target price to pay is actually $0. Therefore, any price above that, even a 3 to 4 dollar a month difference, is seen as extremely annoying to them, because again, they actually only want to pay nothing. This is why you should, if not charging business, at least charge prices that are suffic…

Over the last couple of years, my income has gone up a lot, from "barely scraping by, >50% of my income spent on rent" to "comfortable, can make any small purchases I like without worrying".

This has led to a huge change in my attitude to buying things like app, books, games, movies. If it's a small company/author who cares about their product/book etc. and charges a reasonable amount, I want to pay for what I'm using. Before, I pirated, searched for zero cost stuff, because it was either that or reduce the quality of the food I ate. Now, I can support the people that make the amazing things I use, and I want to support them. I don't think I'm especially unusual in this regard.

I guess the difference is that now, a $5 app purchase is close to zero in its affects on my bank account, a $20 app purchase needs only a few seconds consideration. However, if I see a $1-$10 a month subscription for simple app with very little cloud functionality, that's still a hard no from me because it seems like blatant greed.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#50

Post by seanwilson »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #45
seanwilson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix, Adobe etc. would never be able to go with what's essentially a "pay what you like" or "pay what you claim you earn" subscription if that's what you're getting at. Isn't there something more practical than this?

If the goal is "never leave money on the table", your strategies will be very different than if you goal is "raise enough income to do something you want to do". To whatever extent Netflix or Adobe are attached to the former goal, then certainly they are not going to offer pay-what-you-say-you-can. Whether that's the best goal for them to have, either for themselves or for society at large, is an entirely different q…

> If the goal is "never leave money on the table", your strategies will be very different than if you goal is "raise enough income to do something you want to do".

The pay-what-you-say-you-can approach is problematic when you want to "raise enough" when you can't rely on people to be truthful about what a fair price is though. I can easily imagine this killing a niche app that's not making thousands of sales.

Post reply on HN