I’m making my app free. Change my mind.
Look, I get it. It’s not sexy to make your app free. Everyone is all about raising prices and making B2B SaaS.
Well over here in B2C land, things are different.
I’ve Identified the point where people fall off during my onboarding process. IT’S THE CHECKOUT!!!
My meal planner is $5/month after a 30 day free trial. People don’t even want to try it for free because they don’t want to have to pay for it when their trial is over. Why would they get attached to something that they don’t want to pay for?
I’m going to give it another month with my current pricing and work on my onboarding flow to see if I can reduce friction and get people engaged with my app.
If I can’t get people to sign up for a free trial and convert when the trial ends, I’m seriously considering making it free and finding another way to monetize it.
Change my mind!
Not dissing your idea (I have no idea how it even functions), but maybe people aren't paying for it because it doesn't exactly fit their needs? If it's good enough, people will pay for it. So maybe you just need to do a bit of customer research and figure out why they're not willing to pay $5? ($5/month to me seems like a pretty cheap investment)
Honestly, and this is coming from 10+ years of marketing/advertising, you're probably not charging enough. I only base this on the fact that price can often be an indicator of quality. If you charge $9.99, people might see that and think, "Wow, if it costs $9.99, it must be really helpful. Why else would they charge so much for this service? It must be good."
Maybe try doing that research and charging a little bit more before you go totally free.
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If you charge $9.99, people might see that and think, "Wow, if it costs $9.99, it must be really helpful. Why else would they charge so much for this service? It must be good."
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Interesting. Would love to read more about this. Do you have any articles documented anywhere about pricing strategy?
Absolutely. It's called "Premium pricing". Apple does it really, really well; they're probably the best example.
https://www.priceintelligently.com/premium-pricing
In my own experience, I can share that one of my passion projects is my coffee roasting business. I initially thought about selling 1 lb of coffee for $16 ($1 an ounce). Then, I did some research after a friend suggested I was charging too little and realize that some local competitors were charging up to $22... for 12 oz.! (As an example, the popular Onyx Coffee Lab charges $16 for a 12oz bag in pretty packaging: https://onyxcoffeelab.com/collections/coffee).
I now charge $20 per 16 oz bag and have never had anyone balk at the price.
That’s great insight. I actually know that I have a marketing issue with my product and I’ll be working to improve that.
When I first launched the product, I was charging $10/month for it and didn’t get a single trial signup. Now that it’s $5/month, I’m seeing a small number of trial signups.
But I have yet to see a customer convert from the free trial to a paid plan. I also think there’s an engagement problem to solve.
Yeah man, stick with it! Feel free to share your site and we can provide some suggestions as well, if you'd like.
Edit: Nevermind, I went to your profile and found the link to your site. And now you have a new subscriber!
I'll be honest; this is a really, really good little app. I think all you're missing is some marketing and advertising. You could easily get this in front of a food blogger or healthy eating influencer and get a ton of views. It solves a real world problem that I have every week that I actually sort of started trying to solve using Notion, but then bailed and went back to the good ole white board on the fridge.
I'll use for a month or two and let you know what my feedback is! And you're definitely charging too little - $9.99 would be really good.
Additional thoughts while I'm at it:
-Have you defined your target? Who are you looking to subscribe? I would suggest couples or families, and sell by the login. For example, maybe $9.99 gets you two seats for an account so both partners can check it. Then, you sell a "single" plan for $7.99 so a single person can plan out their meals easily.
-Have you thought of a name change? I'm sure Meal Planner App does decent with SEO but it might be a little sexier if you name is something memorable.
I’d try charging upfront; once off payment of $5.
99% of apps do IAP recurring. Do the opposite.
If it works well at 5$ try raising by 1$ after 3 months. 🤷♂️
If it doesn’t work, make it free or shut it down.
Or adverts as Andrew suggested
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I think it is very smart to experiment with pricing.
I actually added a free plan and I think it helped a lot both from an MRR perspective but also to get a little more data on feature usage / pain points from those free users.
Speaking to those users who were drawn to the app, it was great to hear what improvements I could make to the paid plans that would compel them to upgrade
That’s great insight! Thanks for sharing!
Nothing wrong with offering a free plan. You need to experiment with pricing to discover what works best. You can always revert to all paid plans.
Thanks for the encouragement!
I have subscription fatigue. No offense, but I won’t even consider your app due to pricing. Consider a lifetime license, a year of updates, etc.
That’s not passing any judgement on your app itself, it’s just there are way too many things asking me for $5/mo. And I already skip coffee and Netflix.
Photopea .com is free. Its revenue mainly from ads.
Send emails and we can get you ads to run over at Paved .com
Even if its completely free and hasn't had any revenue, you could sell it for a moderate price on MicroAquire or something like that. After some time that is
That’s a great idea!
Can you explain in one sentence what strong pain/problem does your software solve?
My product is called Meal Planner App. It makes it easy to keep your recipes all in one place and easy to plan meals on the calendar.
I use the app 'Paprika' for this. The killer feature for me was the ability to 'scrape' recipes from a range of sites, and save them automatically.
Syncing between phone and desktop app is also a very useful feature. I scrape the recipes on my laptop, but then when I'm cooking I use my phone.
I think I paid about £40, one off fee for the desktop app and the phone app. Money well spent as far as I'm concerned. I might have balked at a monthly subscription for this.
One thing that it doesn't do, that I wish it did... The desktop experience is a desktop app, not a web app. Feels a bit old-school these days!
That’s great insight, and very encouraging.
My app also scrapes recipes from the web and saves them for you.
And I made the choice to have the app be web based, at least from the start, for that very reason. I wanted it to be seamless on desktop and mobile devices.
I think your app is awesome, and the only thing maybe you're not doing is marketing it appropriately. You gotta get it in the hands of the people who will use it. After looking at Paprika, there's obviously a market for this, and it sounds like Paprika kinda sucks.
I wonder if you could also somehow white label the site for influencers so they could buy it from you and put it on their own sites? For example, this girl on YouTube has really good content and recipes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDbZvuDA_tZ6XP5wKKFuemQ
Then it becomes a B2B SaaS, and that's where the money is!
Why do you think this is a problem? I don't know any person who feels the need to have their recipes in one place and plan a meal on a calendar.
Maybe you can offer this to a dietitian to use it for their patients. Also, I can imagine this can be used for high-profile athletes.
To sell a solution you have to have a problem first. I don't see the problem yet in your comment.
That’s a great idea!
@AndrewKamphey told you to go for that market as well about a month ago.
Now someone else also tells you to. I think this is a worthwhile idea to explore.
Dietitians, personal trainers, doctors(esp. If they have patients with special diet needs like diabetes), Food bloggers that want to share recipes with their community are all potential market opportunities.
B2B has a higher chance of profitability as well. For a dietitian, you can probably charge around $100 per month for if they use your product ( you would definitely need to add additional features to cater to that market).
Before you go around and develop the features, you might want to create mockups and engage some discussions with dietitians.
Show them what you would be building and gather their feedback.
In that discussion, you're hoping to validate if they would find it useful and pay for that. You will also learn about their specific needs.
As an additional point to consider, there are many meal planning saas/software for dietitians.
This is a good thing for 2 reasons:
The problem with free (i am thinking about this as well) is that you have to support free. This is something serious to consider. It can be because of costs or even something stupid like technical (in a previous attempt i was thinking paid first and thus, the database is schema separated and i have difficult to imagine 10-30K+ free users with their own schema each, quite a mess but i may have no choice at the moment).
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