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Ask HN: Pricing: How would you price Code Pal?

2 points by sshrin ↗ HN
Our product is Code Pal: http://www.codepal.me

It is a way to learn programming in a fun and engaging way. Basically, we allow students to learn programming by using their own social data (imagine writing a for loop to print out the names of all your Facebook friends etc.). Our target market is students (and potentially teachers who want to use it in their class).

My question is how do you price the product? Right now, I allow students to try out 10 exercises for FREE and then charge $29.95 to access the remaining ones. I am not sure what to benchmark the price against. Charging too much is clearly not going to work but how much is too much. Also, I don't have enough traffic at this time to A/B test pricing.

How should we proceed?

2 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 12.3 ms ] thread
ScottWhigham
For me, you have to deal with the perception that your course/site is the same experience as buying a book. That is, I think, your competition therefore you could price accordingly. There are pros/cons to your course vs. a book and you could highlight those and position your $29.95 against that. $29.95 could be right - no clue. Seems good to me as a starting point.

Another thing to think about is this: How long would it take for someone to complete the 10 exercises? My concern is that there is a short time frame of user attention and that you are exceeding it with the 10 exercises. You need to figure out at what point during the free trial people are likely to buy and then that's when the free trial ends or is close to ending.

sshrin
Thanks! Yes, the textbook as a reference frame makes a lot of sense and we do see that come up in user tests.

How would you find out the point at which users are likely to pay?