Need pricing help for SMS bot for expecting parents
Hello everyone!
This is my first digital product, so I need a little help figuring out how I should price it. Here's the landing page I have put up for it on Gumroad.
https://ajot.gumroad.com/l/baby-sms
Some details 👇🏽
I use @Twilio to send the daily text message to expecting parents (starting at month 3 of pregnancy).
It costs me $0.02 cents to send each message. So, that would be $0.60 for the month. So, my max cost per user would be $3.60.
One-time payment vs Subscription?
I am leaning towards making it a one-time payment instead of a subscription. This may put the customers at ease knowing that they won’t get charged beyond the pregnancy.
Pricing for one-time payment?
How much should I price this at, given that the lifetime cost per user is around $4.
I am leaning towards $10-15 range. That covers the messaging cost, and a bit of the server costs, and leaves a bit of change.
Is that too aggressive? Too low?
Thank you, and I really appreciate the help.
Hi Amit! I think this is a really fun idea. Your gumroad page looks good. Your excitement comes across as very authentic.
Thoughts on pricing:
I'm imagining that people will find your service at different stages of their pregnancy. People who are 6 months in might (reasonably) want to pay less than people who are 1 month in. This suggests to me that a monthly subscription might make sense. Would it be possible to automatically terminate their subscription after their expected delivery date?
$10-15 seems really cheap to me for a daily service. You always read that you should charge more... I think that might be applicable here. Maybe the sweet spot is in the $20-30 range? I feel like ~$3/month isn't outrageous.
Do you think people would be more likely to reach for their credit card for a $3/month subscription or a $25 one-time fee (assuming that a 30 day refund is offered either way)? I feel like the subscription probably wins.
What do you think?
Thanks Brandon. I really appreciate you taking the time to look at the landing page and providing your thoughts.
That's a really good point about "different stages" of pregnancy. I hadn't thought of that. That makes a good argument for subscription. I am not sure if Gumroad supports subscription model, but I can switch that to Stripe. That should handle the automatic termination I think.
You're probably right about the pricing. Given that it's my first product, I was a bit shy, and didn't want to over charge. I'll re-think that. Thank you!
Regarding $3/month or a $25 one-time, you're right. I would be more willing to pay even $5/month than a $25 one-time, even though it works out about the same for 6 months.
If the product doesn't provide any value after birth then yeah, absolutely make it a one time purchase.
Pricing is always tricky and I'm not at all familiar with this market but my gut feeling says you could increase the price by another $10 or so.
And while I'm here, some unsolicited feedback: I'd let the user chose the time they want to receive the message. 9am ET isn't great if you're in Europe or Asia.
Thanks Noah. It looks like the low pricing is a common denominator in the feedback here. I will definitely rethink that.
You're totally right about EU and Asia. I could add these four zones -
1/ 9a ET - Americas
2/ 9a GMT - Europe
3/ 8a IST - Asia
4/ 8a AET - AUS/NZ
Thank you for that tip 🙏🏽
Just wanted to drop a quick update, and thank everyone on this thread for their help in getting this across the line.
Just launched on Product Hunt this morning, and as of now - it's trending #3 product of the day. This is my first product on PH, so not sure if I should read too much into that, but it's a good feeling.
Ended up going for a 10-day (no cc required) trial, with an upgrade price of $29. Let's see how that goes. I will come back in a few weeks with an update :-)
Thank you again, everyone!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/how-big-is-the-baby
Looks like a fun way for expecting parents to enjoy the experience.
Not sure if you thought about this alternate use case, but you may want to offer an easy/quick way for parents to immediately unsubscribe from the daily messages (maybe twilio provides this?). It could be especially upsetting for people who may encounter difficulties with their pregnancy. I can't tell you how many sad posts on Twitter I have seen from parents who have lost a pregnancy only to continue to be bombarded with advertisements for baby products online (based on their prior searches).
Thanks Kurt. You're 100% right. This is a very important consideration. I have confirmed this - Twilio does handle that with START and STOP messages.
But, I should note this in the landing page. That not only can they cancel at any point (should I end up going for subscription), but they can also stop and start them at any point. No spam. No advertisements.
Really good point. Thank you again!