3
4 Comments

How much would Indie Hackers subscriptions cost ?

Hi @csallen , I was just wondering , if you wanted to sell subscriptions for IH , how much would you charge ?

#meta

  1. 1

    It depends on what people would pay, which itself depends largely on who I'd be charging (i.e. how much money they have), what problem IH would be solving for them, and how well IH could solve that problem.

    I'm not a particularly big fan of B2C business models, because it's hard to charge a lot unless you're selling cars, housing, degrees, makeup/clothes/fashion, or a handful of other big ticket items. If I'd been forced to charge 2.5 years ago, my gut tells me it likely would've been around $150 for lifetime access or something like that. Then I would've focused hard on providing educational materials and exclusive access to AMAs or sessions with the people who came on my podcast.

    1. 1

      I am curious about monetized vs. free communities.

      It is probably a lot easier to grow a community if its free, especially if you don't have a popular podcast to drive traffic. However, if you look at NomadList, the opposite argument applies. @levelsio is making roughly $45k/mo, while IH is making $5,600. If Peter was doing some B2B deals as the primary source of revenue, perhaps he wouldn't have gotten NomadList off the ground. I assume Stripe cares more about growth than revenue at this point. But is it better to charge for membership when building a community, since cash flow is most important? Why or why not?

      Also, why charge $150 for lifetime access instead of some monthly recurring fee (billed annually)?

      1. 3

        IH doesn't actually make any money today. We were acquired by Stripe in April 2017, at which point we stopped generating revenue, so that $5600 figure is from March 2017, over two years ago. With regard to IH, Stripe cares 100% about growth, 0% about revenue, at least for now.

        Annual/lifetime plans allow a bootstrapper to reach profitability muuuuuch faster than charging monthly. Roughly 12x faster, if you don't factor in the fact that monthly users churn. 15-20x faster if you do.

        I'd probably charge a lifetime membership upfront to get the first users in the door. I might switch to annual later or just raise prices. It doesn't matter as much as you might think. Customers paying recurring fees eventually churn. Everyone pays some lifetime value.

        EDIT: Also worth noting that the podcast doesn't drive nearly as much traffic to IH as the written interviews and our newsletter do.

        1. 1

          Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Trending on Indie Hackers
Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 19 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments