Pricing change and growth

After I announced that I would be working full-time on JustComments, I started looking into ways to generate a reliable stream of revenue for JustComments. Initial PAYG pricing was ok, but it lacked a crucial piece: big scale to generate enough revenue.

So the new pricing is $5 monthly subscription + actual cost. Let me show how existing users reacted to it:

1. some weeks ago I introduced a recurring charge for active API keys so that the trial period would end within seven days
2. from ~700 users I accumulated over time, only 60 decided to switch to a paid plan
3. on the 22nd of July, I introduced the minimal monthly fee of $5 and offered a refund for existing users. As the majority of users have already made the initial payment, I didn't receive so many negative responses as from the ~640 users that quit the service in # 2. So far, I got two refund requests.

So what I have learned:

• Long trial periods are bad because people even forget they have an account/forget login details and so on. On the contrary, users who see the value in the system choose a paid plan immediately, not even waiting for the trial period to be over.
• A free plan is great to gain more users and get the feedback, but most likely free-plan users won't convert to paying customers. In my case, giving out a free-plan would increase operating costs, and I have a limit on the number of API keys I can support. So I decided to offer an open-source server implementation so that non-paying customers could still use the service but self-host and self-manage the infrastructure: https://github.com/justcomments/jc-server
• These learnings probably don't apply to ad-powered business models

Also, I made a lot of improvements to the product: better UI, comment reactions, webhooks, and a better landing page. Now I will focus on content marketing to bring more users with the new pricing model, and hopefully, the revenue grows to an acceptable level.

Any suggestions from you, fellow indie hackers? Btw, could you review my updated landing page? https://just-comments.com

#landing-page-feedback