Should I go freemium with this idea? Help!
Common advice around here is for indie-hackers not to ever do freemium most of the time, at least. So I've been hesitating wether or not it might be a good choice for my app.
My thoughts are that since the market is both wide and big, I might either go with one of the two approaches below:
1. Free plan / $9 premium
2. Free trial / lower price $2.80
Another potential opportunity with freemium is to have in-app purchases, although I'm not ready yet to go down that path.
Any thoughts or experiences?
Personally, I have subscription fatigue. If your app was $10, $20, $30, for a one-time purchase, I’d keep considering at it. But a subscription just pushes me away. Have you considered sketch’s model or fontbase’s model?
I had a clipboard manager app that I recommended to everybody. They hadn’t added any new features in years, but still switched to a subscription. I was so bummed. Needless to say, I switched.
I totally get both sides to a subscription as a consumer and maker. I just hate losing access to everything if I miss a month. Plus, it may not make sense for me to upgrade at a certain time.
Also, I put my money where my mouth is. I switched from Adobe Creative Cloud to the Affinity suite. My only subscriptions are for the Google Drive, design resources, and living costs. Simply put, not matter how cute or effective your app and plants are, I won’t even consider it due to the subscription.
I think it’s a cute app, and collecting things like badges (or plants) is a good way to gamify it. Nice job on the landing page and branding. Would like to see a few more plants haha
Another alternative to subscriptions would be to add plant packs. There could be a free one for starting out. And then maybe tropical, taiga, forest, etc. and others could be an in-app purchases that would last a month or two.
Probably not what you wanted to hear. And there are plenty of people who don’t mind subscriptions. But I’m sticking to my principles. Finally, get more opinions. I commented simply because I have a strong one.
@fromtheexchange, thanks so much for your feedback. I love strong opinions, btw. I have mine and always try to share them when possible, since I believe very few people do that these days, mostly afraid of confrontation or judgement. But strong opinions are needed to create good conflict and spark ideas. So I appreciate your honesty! :)
You have a really good point and a few great ideas that I hadn't considered. First, people in general hate subscriptions. Particularly app subscriptions. And for some reason, it's easier to mentally justify a SaaS subscription than a mac / mobile app that you have installed on your machine, even if both represent the same benefits to the user and costs to the developer. It's just the way the market is.
And I include myself in the bucket. For example, I feel the same way about design software or fonts. I've bought quite a few over the years, and always prefer to pay once whenever possible, rather than using subscription models. Even if the cost is higher. And I'm still using Adobe CS5, which I bought a few years ago, and still works fine so I haven't upgraded to the cloud yet, lol :)
In my app's case, I have two main features: focus sessions (plants) and insights (automatically tracking used apps and websites and providing reports). The "plant" feature doesn't represent any cost to me, but the insights do, since behind the scenes on the server all the user activity is automatically classified with AI, stored, etc. So a lifetime might eventually get to a point where it's not sustainable as an indie dev as an ongoing cost.
But the most important takeaway from your comment is that you made me realize that my problem could start at brand positioning. I'm highlighting the "cute plants" focus feature, for which people are not willing to pay more than a few bucks, being totally honest with myself. But I should probably lean towards highlighting automatic time tracking, and how understanding your time usage can help you become more productive. I have similar Insights features to my competitor rescuetime, and people pay them $9 a month.
So I might separate the two main features or some other changes that allow a balance between good price and sustainability. I'm still experimenting with pricing (up to a week ago, I had a lifetime for $29 and got a few people bought it). I'll add it back, keep on tweaking see how it goes.
Again, thanks so much for your thoughts!
Ahh, I see.
Have you considered running the machine learning model locally? That would mean little recurring costs to you. I also use machine learning in the app I’m building, and serverless + caching brings down the costs a ton. Still holding to my subscriptions opinion though haha
I agree with your statement on the positioning. Personally, I haven’t had the best luck with automated time tracking. I’m using spreadsheets and it works well enough. Certainly well enough for me not to consider $100+/yr subscription. I’ve purchased klokki and timemator, so I am interested in solutions. Anyway
What unique problems does the AI solve?