lifetime subscription makes no economic sense imho. New phones, platforms, APIs and the like come out every day. Getting them to work isn’t free. Thanks for having the balls to shoot this idea down - I don’t want you to go out of business for lack of capital!
As a developer, Lifetime subscriptions = instant suicide. A yearly or a monthly would help pay the bills (Which is not happening in your case as it only pays for server and not all the bills) if done properly.
$2 - $5 a month is not asking much at all. As long as it pays all the bills (server, labor, etc), then it should work out nicely.
You need to think this through a bit more. You said yourself it’s not bringing in enough revenue to suit your ideal plans. Shifting to lifetime plans at the prices you mention front loads a bunch of revenue but it’s less than 2 years worth of the existing per user revenue. You need to keep new users coming on board at an increasing rate forever even if your cost base has excellent economies of scale. This is not impossible but is that the best way of achieving your goals? You might miss those recurring revenues down the track…
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As a consumer I like the idea of paying once to own a product forever. However as someone with more insight into what it takes to run a service like this that model just doesn’t make sense to me.
It’s very simple. Costs for hosting, supporting, improving the service (all which will be expected to continue for the LIFETIME that was paid for) will continue to cost money each year. Eventually you will burn through the money you gained up front and your target market will be saturated. No more money. At that point you would be forced to A) close shop. or B) create value add features that cost extra which complicates the simple, attractive model you were shooting for in the first place.
I think your current yearly rates are very reasonable. We just need ways to drive more users in.
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Yeah, there’s no way I’m going to support lifetime memberships. Not sure what I was thinking, but yearly subscriptions is the way to go. Also, any iPhone app I build is going to be free. You’re already paying to be a subscriber, no need to extract more money out of you.
I am considering a business class subscription at $100 / month, which would make all of your feeds update every single minute. But otherwise, premium buys you everything there is to offer. It’s the Apple way: simple pricing that encourages you to sign-up, knowing I won’t try to squeeze more juice out of you. (I don’t consider that business class subscription an add-on so much as it is a special upgrade that very few people would ever want. But every other new premium-only feature: search, possibly social, and anything else that’s new is covered under your original premium account.)
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