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6 Comments

Subscription per month VS pay once

Hello!

What do you think about "pay once" VS monthly subscription?
I'm building service for provisioning servers (installing PHP, nginx, db) and thinking about making instead of monthly subscription model, pay per provision model.

What do you think?

  1. 3

    I think it's a fine balance of understanding your customers and working towards something sustainable that works for you.

    The holly grail is monthly/yearly subscriptions, but it's a hard sell. One off purchases are often easier.

  2. 2

    I usually try to avoid any subscription.
    Only paying for compute and storage (pay as you go) and building a list of awesome free services for my disposal.
    https://freeplan.app

    But I once bought tailwindui (one time payment) for $200.
    It's took a few months for it to payback but now I'm glad I have it. I would not have bought the subscription model. Can't handle the mental overhead keeping track of each subscription.

  3. 1

    The key here is to understand that those project that charge lifetime plans, what they are really doing is to advanced the future lifetime value.

    In other words, most of their users only last for 3-6 months, so if someone pay this amount or more upfront, it's the best way to ensure that you get the most out of a customer.

    This happens a lot in app subscriptions.

  4. 1

    The right answer is whatever best aligns with your customers needs & how often they get value from your product.

    Subscriptions are great for companies. Predictable income, whoop!

    Customers need to see the value in paying & paying again & again & so on.

    Monthly payments work until I don't need the product that month or don't use up plan. After a couple months, I'm gonna cancel.

  5. 1

    I would think the monthly/yearly should be the base. Then, run "lifetime memberships" promos once in a while. You get the best of all worlds there.

  6. 1

    Hey Anton

    I did some research on this a few months ago for one of our projects. I compiled everything in this Google doc. Feel free to take a look. The key takeaway was, that sponsorships are mostly priced by CPM = cost per thousand subscribers.

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pfaw4-eMln8Xou-aKI9QKMs9AEIQWt2BdmcakP10PWw/edit?usp=sharing

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