Monthly vs One Time Payment. Which is the best?

Getting a successful monthly subscription business in place is ideal if you're trying to scale to a point where VC can potentially come in - easier to try and raise when you can project cashflows and revenue.

But I think it comes down to what's your user base's willingness to pay for your product/service. And in the case of most vector art, icon services I've seen, they seem to do the freemium basic + pay for the premium illustrations. Not sure how that plays out in terms of revenue and business model though. Is there a reason why subscription could work better here?

Hey Fatul, I'd take a look at Nucleo. They have a killer business model around icons for this and I pay them an annual subscription without hesitation.

I think it ultimately depends on how consistently you can keep things updated/fresh and what audience you're targeting. Certain types of customers will need resources like you're creating more often than others (and be more willing to pay frequently).

Do you have any specific financial goals for the project?

I sell a js library which might be comparable, I’ve gone with yearly subscription. With a monthly price it’s easy to pay for example five bucks, download the resources, and cancel the subscription.

The software license is perpetual (customers are free to keep using the product if the subscription expires) but when expired they don’t receive updates/support.

The subscription price is fixed, so when I raise prices existing customers automatically receive a “discount” when renewing.

I also sell products that are paid for once but I find this means that new customers are paying for support on existing customers. The subscription model is a way better fit to build a stable customer relation which is best for everyone.

Hey Fatul, based on what you're offering, if you did monthly pricing couldn't someone simply sign up then download everything and cancel? They would lose out on the future weekly updates but it sounds like they could get the majority of the content all at once and then come back a few months later, download everything new and cancel again :(

For what you're offering I would strongly consider doing a higher one time payment instead of monthly or consider doing recurring annual payments. Monthly doesn't really seem to make sense here in my opinion.

If you are using a one-time payment, you'll need to find new customers all the time to generate revenue. I'm in a similar situation (I'm selling some premium WordPress plugins) and trying to find a way to resolve this issue and convert my customers to a monthly or yearly subscription.

In your case I'd offer two options:

• one-time purchase: buy what you want, pay one time, use it as long as you like it
• monthly subscription: become a member, pay a monthly fee and get access to all the resources as long as you are paying your monthly fee