A different pricing model
Hey IH!
I'm exploring a new pricing model for https://indiebricks.io that I don't see used very often -- I'm going to offer a one time payment for access to my service. No recurring payment, but new features may be subject to additional one time payments.
What do you think?
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I think you should move to recurring revenue. That is what everyone here needs.
Agree.
I see a lot of people making use of "Lifetime" deals in the beginning, which I personally think is a good approach. After that, switching full to recurring revenue is probably the best thing you can do.
I think, and most SaaS founders would agree, that "lifetime" deals is to kickstart your product.. then move onto recurring.
i agree with your @NazuJam because we do the same for our tool https://linkedcamp.com . we start from lifetime in 2021 then move to per month seat.
I love your landing page though!
thank you
Agree with what @ourwebassistant is saying. Difficult to sustain a business for long with just a one time payment and making existing buyers pay for new features is going to be quite an uphill task.
Thank you kkumarkg! I appreciate your thoughts on the matter. You both definitely have me rethinking this. Maybe the better approach for me is to just have a year subscription option for now?
👍🏻
Life time deals can be a tricky playing field. Some early people would feel entitled to everything in the future, or say a price is too high if you plan it over many years of use.
If you are up front that X features are included and other premium ones in the future are extra (discounted a bit for lifetimers) then it might be worth a try at the start.
Things to think of are the longer term running costs and what rate you'd need to grow with new money coming in to fund it.
What does the service do out of interest?
You're answering all my questions tonight! And with some good answers too!
Thank you for your feedback. I guess my big thing is doubting my product is valuable enough to my audience that they would be a subscribing member.
Here is a demo I recently recorded, but basically Indiebricks simplifies goal setting and sharing for Indie Hackers who are building in public and want to share their goals and their progress. I'm currently working on a new feature that will expand things a bit by adding a catalog of "bricks" aka goals for users to chose from depending on what they are trying to accomplish
Great demo/ cadence! Good job 👍🏾
Thanks @nyaggah!
You can have two pricing tiers. If they need advanced features have to pay monthly plan
a. One time fee - Limited features
b. Monthly/yearly subscription - Advance features
That's a good idea!
I think nomadlist.com does something similar. You may increase the price due to improved functionality/new features, but for new clients only.
The key point here with this pricing approach is to keep growing your customer base to keep revenue growing...
I didn't know nomadlist did this! Thanks for the extra info!
I'm thinking the same for Glyph (www.glyphleads.com) charging a one-time fee. But I'd need some more paying subscribers to find whether they prefer recurring pricing model or lifetime pricing!
Glyphleads looks pretty cool! And I don't know considering the continued added value and the potential to make money from your service a recurring model might serve you well!
Amazing project! Why don't you charge a "fee" for each goal that isn't completed? (with thorough terms & conditions )... this way the marketing can be: if you accomplish your goals, the tool is free, if you don't, you have to pay.
How does that sound for #alternativepayment?
Ahhh I like this. It's very clever! Thank you for the idea!
Make sure you think about long term database and server usage ( i.e. usage of firebase for example)
Not sure about the outcome of this experiment, most people are used to subscriptions or lifetime deals OTP.
If it's something new I don't think it should be the pricing model..
Just my 2 cents
I have a similar approach for Polygonjs, where it allows clients to receive updates for 12 months, but after that they would need to renew their licenses. It works mostly because my service is very light in terms of server maintenance, and it's an app that works best when installed locally.
In addition to that, I've recently opened a marketplace where it will be possible to purchase ready-made tools.
But in the end, every market is different. It's always a matter of testing.
Thank you for your insight! Yeah, It is more of a license model and not often seen in the web application world. I definitely have some more thinking to do, but for now until I figure it out I'm going to charge a yearly subscription fee and see where that gets me!
I get the allure of wanting to offer one-time payments. That's what I'd prefer to do if I had the choice as a user. But I also know that's a difficult model to sustain.
I think the nice, meet-in-the-middle option is what Tony Dinh (https://twitter.com/tdinh_me) is doing. He accepts one-time payments to use a product for life with one year of upgrades. And after a year, you have the option to pay and continue receiving upgrades. He throws in a renewal discount, too.
You can read more about it on his Xnapper pricing page: https://xnapper.com/pricing
This is what probably 90% of commercial WordPress theme and plugin shops do now.
Works great for products like WordPress themes and plugins that:
Are complete by themselves without the updates (user can choose to use the product indefinitely if they choose to)
Have individual licensing/ownership model (not so for a shared platform like SaaS)
Need to be constantly updated not just to add new features but to keep up with an ever-changing platform (so users have a significant reason to update, in spite of [1] above).
Thank you! That makes a lot of sense and is definitely a model I'm familiar with. I'm quickly realizing that this strategy would become a headache for web applications in the long term!
Thank you @CaseyOcampo! This super helpful.
your content and link is fine
not bad, basically somewhere in between services and product. Pay for the product and then want additional feature , pay for that feature.
I have not seen this model. but worth trying
I've seen this before with smaller tools. Sometimes they'll give you 1 year of updates with purchase (e.g. divutils) or they follow the old version model where you pay a fee to upgrade to the latest (e.g. alfred).
Thanks @grahamjpark! Yeah this is totally what I was thinking at first.
It’s all about the math. Calculate on what your life time value on the costumer will be and choose the one how has the best. If your product is good recurring revenue is often the way to go but depends. Is this a service they can buy multiple times?
That's an interesting idea. I suppose it could be a service they could buy multiple times! I'll have to see where this goes, but this definitely gives me some food for thought. Thank you!
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This is a super fun and interesting idea! Thank you for sharing!