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Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

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Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

#271

Post by beret4breakfast »

scubakid wrote: post #257
beret4breakfast wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing is a super tricky issue, especially when its for something related to financials. I think there are plenty of people who wouldn't bat an eye at $14p/m (and maybe they are the target audience), but there are also plenty of people who aren't buying $14 cocktails. I fall into the camp where I like to play around with spreadsheets (free -£time) or other online calculators (free) just to make loose projections and…

Would you fall into the camp of "make it universally cheaper"? Or carve up the feature set into more tiers with different prices? Curious how you would divvy things up, if the latter. I do also grant general discounts on request (info on pricing page). You're probably right about the enterprise / benefits angle, but at the moment I wouldn't have a clue how to actually go about it. Enterprise sales is the kind of thin…

I’m speaking as someone who has never had to price anything. To me it feels like a service that doesn’t give me monthly benefit (i.e. frequent recurring usage like my iCloud storage or Netflix etc) as I wouldn’t use it often enough, so paying monthly just feels like a waste to me. The difference between monthly rate if bought as a year and per month is pretty big to incentivise people to pay up for a full year - I personally dislike this strategy, it implies to me that I have to pay a 50% markup just to have the option to change my mind after a month or two (to me this implies I might, so best to get all the money up front).

I think you want to incentivise long term ownership of the product (MRR->YRR) with a focusing of the price at yearly. It aligns more with financial years / tax filings and the general cadence of people looking at their finances.

Now as I say I have absolutely no experience and haven’t done any market analysis. So this is just my opinion.

Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

#272

Post by luke_s »

scubakid wrote: post #202
luke_s wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I feel the same way about the $14 a month. Perhaps a "one shot access pass" or something that lets you in for a few months while you do financial planning may be useful. It might also be a good opportunity to check back in with people later (say in 12 months time) and get them to sign up again, if you can provide them with valuable insights and help them stick to their plan

Do you feel like it's more the price or the billing frequency options that affect the psychology here? To me, a month of planning for the price of a cocktail sounds about right (esp. when compared with traditional advisory services), but perhaps others think in different terms. Or just disagree? haha. Interestingly, I still get messages fairly often from new users that (in their opinion) pricing is actually too low..…

I think for me it's about the ongoing nature of the subscription. Everything is a subscription model these days, and I'm quite wary of "zombie" subscriptions that take money every month, but I don't actually use them.

For me financial planning feels like a "once every 5 years" process with possible lightweight annual check ins to see how I'm tracking towards the plan and tweek some details. A monthly subscription doesn't map well to this model. This is why I suggested something like an "access pass" might be a better fit for somebody like me.

Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

#274

Post by bobboies »

sieabahlpark wrote: post #227
bobboies wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it’s a depressing thought—but considering that money can be thought of as a “unit of work”, and so many people are tying it up in stocks of large companies, miles away—praying they won’t get hit by a car before that special day. What about getting units of work to start working right now, instead of hoping some big company will make people’s money “grow” into the future? Invest in local economy. Invest in peop…

I'd rather not be unable to work and be poor by "investing in people" and "local economy". They sure as hell don't come to my aid when I need it. You for shit have no idea how bad elder care is in America

By investing locally and in people I don’t mean spend all your money. But to that end, neither are the big companies going to come to your aid. But your neighbors and local business owners will be MUCH more likely to come to your aid after supporting them and helping them succeed.

Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

#275

Post by speg »

scubakid wrote: post #95
palnewbro wrote: post #92

Looks awesome! Could you share your tech stack to build it?

Sure thing. I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and GCP. Happy to field any questions if you've been wondering what any of those are like.

Despite using Vuetify daily at my employer I didn’t recognize it, thought it was Tailwind. That’s a good thing!

I assume you are on version 3 of Vue and Vuetify? Did you have any trouble upgrading if you started on v2?

Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

#276

Post by sjducb »

I ran into a bug so bad I gave up.

I entered some details, then got confused by the UI so I pressed the back button.

Then I got a “Recover Data” message, but to actually recover the data I had to upgrade to premium. Obviously I’m not going to upgrade to premium for an app where I have spent about 2 seconds looking around it.

Also I’m not going to spend another 10 min re-entering my details.

Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

#277

Post by scubakid »

sjducb wrote: post #276

I ran into a bug so bad I gave up. I entered some details, then got confused by the UI so I pressed the back button. Then I got a “Recover Data” message, but to actually recover the data I had to upgrade to premium. Obviously I’m not going to upgrade to premium for an app where I have spent about 2 seconds looking around it. Also I’m not going to spend another 10 min re-entering my details.

Sorry to hear you ran into trouble with the sandbox. Data persistence is a premium feature, but it should warn about unsaved data if you try to close the tab or navigate away. Did that not happen in your case? And if so, what browser/OS/device?

If it's not clear, you can just sign up for the free trial of Premium, cancel it immediately, and have 7 days to try everything out for free. Perhaps offering a limited time to restore a previous session without needing to do that would be nice, but I don't think I have a good mechanism to make that tamper-resistant.

Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

#278

Post by scubakid »

ericksoa wrote: post #269

Biggest problem with the pricing is that you are selling an expensive tool to cheap bastards that tend to be in your ICP. Idea: sell this with a course to idiots and call it "how to be nerd rich", and then create the OnlyFans of Finance by letting said idiots subscribe for 5 dollars a month + streaming fee to the kinds of nerds you are marketing this to now. I offer you this amazing plan at a 0 basis point equity sta…

And I assume rebrand to OnlyFinance? XD

Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

#279

Post by scubakid »

Amorymeltzer wrote: post #253
scubakid wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently you can do $14 for a month of access at a time. Does that scratch this itch? Or is there something about having access for even smaller windows of time that appeals to you? The read-only idea outside of those windows is an interesting idea. I don't have a mechanism for that at the moment, but I'll consider it if some other folks express interest in this kind of plan.

Yes indeed, that'd be grand. I'm finding lots of stuff as I play with it, but after a bit I don't need (or want!) to fiddle with it regularly. A read-only option, whether free or even for a modest fee, would be ideal, especially when paired with occasional editing "unlocks" or "only-monthly/quarterly-progress-point-additions" or the like.

I wonder if the commenter who was talking about dark patterns might look at the notional implementation for this and say it feels like the tool holding your plans hostage.

I'm also curious how much you would see yourself returning to this "read-only" view. I don't imagine there would be a lot to do if you can't make changes to anything.

Re: Show HN: I spent 2 years building a personal finance simulator

#280

Post by scubakid »

speg wrote: post #275
scubakid wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure thing. I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and GCP. Happy to field any questions if you've been wondering what any of those are like.

Despite using Vuetify daily at my employer I didn’t recognize it, thought it was Tailwind. That’s a good thing! I assume you are on version 3 of Vue and Vuetify? Did you have any trouble upgrading if you started on v2?

Landing page site is using v3, but the actual app is still on v2. There are soooo many API / attribute name changes that when I eventually migrate the core app from v2 to v3, I can tell it's going to be a bit of a nightmare :(
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