I'm gonna try monetizing Semicolon&Sons soon. I produce 4 screencasts per month and want to charge a subscription fee. If I had monthly subscriptions (say 20 dollars pm) , I would assume that a sizable proportion of the customers would pay that $20 once per year, binge everything, then cancel until next year.
Therefore I was thinking about quarterly billing, so as to lock in a higher 'minimal cost of entry'.
Thoughts?
Are you using patreon for this? Try using 5$/month like that and if you are planning to sell in future, it helps to build a great MRR value, because if someone wants to acquire, they see MRR. Even if yearly whole price and MRR collective price for year is same, valuation of company which opts MRR is 5-10 times more valuable.
If you are doing for your own purpose, then patreon or youtube subscriptions might help you for a low barrier entry.
Charge less, attract more people, and offer merchandise to buy from stores like teespring. And add more people to network.
Thanks for your input. MRR sounds good to me too.
I'll be using Stripe for this because
I very occasionally get a subscriber like what you're concerned about. On average, people stay more than a year, though.
I think the main thing is to make sure people see the value in continuing.
Is $20 enough money to your subscribers that they're motivated to try hard to optimize it? Are they mostly software professionals looking to start their own thing or are many of them students on a tight budget?
One thing to consider is that you can always start with lower prices and increase them as you get more content produced. Once churn increases, you have a signal.
I see. I might be over-estimating the risk.
I think the demographics targeted might matter. If I preferentially target people over (say) 25, then they'll likely have the income to support a longer subscription.
FWIW, I no longer have a nice SV salary and subscribe to around $70/month worth of screencasts (ranging from 9 to $15/month, mostly bought in Black Friday deals). Many of my customers earn far more than I do and their companies pay for my screencasts anyway.
Some of them are for tech stacks I don't use but I just dip in for ideas!