Thanks for the feedback! Pricing is not my forte. My thought process was basically this:
- In general, people are probably only planning a single trip at a time (an exception might be if travel agents were to be interested)
- Based on that assumption, it came down to what resolution of access people would want. With the current model, 6 months of editing access comes down to $35. I could, equivalently, just charge $35 for 6mo of access, but in my head, I thought people would be more likely to actually give it a shot if the barrier to entry were cheaper (in this case $10).
So it could be that my actual price is just too high (i.e. $35/6mo of editing access is too much). I haven't gotten much feedback one way or another on this (though one could argue that the lack of purchases could be seen as pretty clear feedback). I've just read that founders tend to underprice their SaaS services, so I was wary of starting too low.
I'm coming at it from someone who does regular budgeting and subscribes to software for that. Big communities built around that so there is potential also.
The pricing comes off as aimed at those planning big one-off trips not regular annual vacation. Those one-off trips are nice, but would be more sporadic and wouldn't you prefer a regular annual subscribing user over a one-off?
It generally costs more to gain a new customer.
At $35 for 6 months, that would be $70 annually if I wanted that. As what I'd consider an "add-on" product, it's far too much. Maybe something like $4.5/m or $45/yr.
Yes! Budgeter here as well :) My YNAB subscription is well worth it, BUT I use YNAB at least weekly. That was a big struggle I had with coming up with a pricing model that made sense here--realistically, it seems like most/many people will only be actively using Itinee for relatively brief periods of time throughout the year, which, at least if I were the customer, would make me wary of long subscriptions.
As a developer/founder I absolutely would prefer regular subscriptions to sporadic one-offs, I just doubt(ed) if people would actually signup for that.
I certainly agree that transitioning to a subscription model would require lower prices to be feasible and may be sufficient to get people on board with "wasting" their subscription for 75% of the year.
As a tangent, I find that it's really hard to get this kind of feedback from real/potential customers (like yourself!) but such feedback is incredibly valuable (thank you!). I wonder if there's a market for some service where I could pay $100 for 3 people to go to my landing page, try my product (free of cost to them, obviously) and then be open to some conversation about their experience. It seems like there could be a market for that given the "Indie Hacker" boom. Maybe such a thing already exists.
That could work! I'm curious what makes subscription models more attractive from your point of view. Is it just simpler to understand? It seems strictly less flexible than a pay-for-what you need model. I suppose in your example the advantage is that you can get a discount by paying for more up front which is a clear advantage for people who will take multiple trips in a year or are planning a trip far in advance.
I received a similar suggestion years ago from someone else, and it worked very well. It's effectively bigger discounts for longer & larger service plans up front. I found it effectively shifted the conversation from "How can I get a discount /beat you up on your price?" to "Ok, what is the right plan for our project"?
This is not quite like consulting/custom dev gigs, but has similar attributes. For purchases/subscriptions like yours, I've noticed that they often seem to create a tension between buying the two most likely to meet your needs - the longer higher-cost one is priced just low enough to be tempting. This probably indicates a lot of A/B testing of pricing, and decisions about whether you want to make it easier for your customers to decide, pointing customers to one plan or the other, what really drives higher purchasing levels and overall income.
They're suggesting a pricing model from the perspective of running this business instead of a pricing model from the perspective of using this service. Subscriptions are worth way more to a (tech) business than one-off purchases.
- In general, people are probably only planning a single trip at a time (an exception might be if travel agents were to be interested)
- Based on that assumption, it came down to what resolution of access people would want. With the current model, 6 months of editing access comes down to $35. I could, equivalently, just charge $35 for 6mo of access, but in my head, I thought people would be more likely to actually give it a shot if the barrier to entry were cheaper (in this case $10).
So it could be that my actual price is just too high (i.e. $35/6mo of editing access is too much). I haven't gotten much feedback one way or another on this (though one could argue that the lack of purchases could be seen as pretty clear feedback). I've just read that founders tend to underprice their SaaS services, so I was wary of starting too low.