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Charge more for app subscriptions

mronge.com

51–60 of 149 posts

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#51

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…

[deleted]

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#52

Man I dunno, for the sector they're in, folks are pretty likely to already be paying for a subscription to the Adobe suite, and honestly I think the whole "subscription" thing is gonna strangle Adobe in the future when there's a generation of artists who grew up using other tools that were buy once, use until upgrading something else breaks it, and/or were easier to pirate. Also I have a piece of hardware I bought fr…

Thanks for buying Luna! :)

We've never taken features away and put them behind a subscription paywall, and we never intend to! So don't worry about that!

Also hardware allows us to have the upgrade pricing model you described. If we make a hardware device that's even better than the Luna you have now, you can choose to upgrade! Escaping the App Store model has been a really refreshing part of making hardware.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#53

The higher revenues for onetime purchase show the weakness of subscriptions vs the old upgrade model, and I wish Apple would understand it. Subscriptions carry the fear of paying for something you won’t be using, or being nickel and dimed for years on end. Upgrades are a much simpler purchase decision. Am I using the app? Is it offering a good value? Does the upgrade provide new features I want or need at a reasonabl…

Upgrades are still a good option but I didn't discuss them in the article because they aren't supported on the App Store.

One caveat with upgrades is it's difficult to maintain many version of the same app. Now with frequent hardware and OS upgrades (yearly!) it's even more expensive than ever to maintain many versions.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#54

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…

In an ideal world where people have a decent disposable income, those arguments might be true. In the real world, it's not that "people don't want to pay anything", it's that people have a small amount of money to throw at things for a marginally better experience. I sure like keyboard-driven apps, but I'm never going to pay as much as I pay for my entire Internet package for any online service. Hell, all of them I p…

The anchoring is different --

Consumer: Pay $ZZZ/mo for internet, used to $1/yr apps, etc

Business: No idea what the internet bill is, doesn't see corp credit card bill, and for purchases for some level of value, used to do initial procurement flows for $100+/mo, a bit more or $1K/mo, pretty real for $10K+/mo (ex: ROI calc), ... but approval flow for < $100/mo is a "hey-o mgr, this site look alright to you?"

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#55

The higher revenues for onetime purchase show the weakness of subscriptions vs the old upgrade model, and I wish Apple would understand it. Subscriptions carry the fear of paying for something you won’t be using, or being nickel and dimed for years on end. Upgrades are a much simpler purchase decision. Am I using the app? Is it offering a good value? Does the upgrade provide new features I want or need at a reasonabl…

Higher upfront revenue for the onetime purchase option doesn't necessarily correspond to higher lifetime revenue per visitor.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I choose to trust people. Partly because I've seen how corrosive not trusting people frequently ends up.

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#57
post #42

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…

Just to clarify, with the Jetbrains model you don't get to keep the current version, your fallback license is for the version that was available 12 months prior to the date you decided to stop paying.

(Presumably this is so you can't upgrade for a month, then cancel, and end up with a perpetual license for the current version.)

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#58

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…

Apple does this automatically with their price bands?

Re: Charge more for app subscriptions

#59
post #42

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…

This is roughly how the collectorz.com desktop apps work. Once your service plan expires, you lose the ability to update and some cloud features, but you can always use the version you currently have (or update to the last version that was available within your service plan). If I open Movie Collector, which I had a paid subscription for but let lapse, and try to update, I get:

Your current version: 18.4 build X

You can update to version: 19.5 build X (Note: your update plan expired on 2019-XX-XX)

If you renew your update plan, you will be able to update to version: 20.6 build X

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