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Ask HN: Subscription models – why is the cheapest non-free tier so much?

9 points by DharmaPolice ↗ HN
Apologies, I'm sure this has come up many times but I've noticed that a number of sites/services (usually which have free tiers) will start their cheapest paid tier at more than $5 a month. Is there any specific logic to this?

For example, the monthly fees for:

- Reddit Premium - $5.99 - Evernote - £5.99 ($7.39) - YouTube Premium - £11.99 ($14.80) - Experian Credit Check - £14.99 ($18.50) - Microsoft (Office) 365 Personal - £5.99 ($7.39)

Whether these services are worth the money is not my question - but is it not profitable to offer a e.g. $2 monthly tier (in general, not for these sites in particular)? On Patreon (different I realise) $1/$2 supporter tiers do seem more common so there are obviously people who would pay $1 a month for something but wouldn't pay $6 a month. Which is what I'd expect.

9 comments

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ljf
My assumptions:

Paid tier users come with costs, they want support and queries solved quickly

By making the cost small (2 cups of coffee a month) but not tiny they actually encourage users to use and value the service (how many free tools have you neglected over time?)

They want the slightly richer customers to take their base packages as they will be more likely to buy the expensive packages in the future.

keiferski
Call it the "willing to get my wallet out" amount. People willing to spend any money for something will be willing to spend $5-6, at minimum. Charging only $2 is just leaving money on the table.
eternityforest
I'm sure there's some level of untapped market for average consumers.

$5 a month is a LOT to someone who isn't rich. A few of those services is the difference between being "maybe able to go to a concert a few times a year and still save a bit" or "Literally living on cereal".

Like, look at how much use Amazon Prime and Netflix get. That's the level of service I would expect from something that costs more than a dollar or two.

I do have a VPS that costs $5 a month or so, and a $5 torrent seedbox that I use for some large files on some work projects. But I am actively looking for ways to eliminate that seedbox(I think Google Drive is probably enough).

keiferski
My point isn’t that $5 is an insignificant amount of money, but that people who are willing to spend $2 on non-essential web services are generally willing to pay $5.
eternityforest
If it were 50 cents, you might have a chance at an entirely new market though.
brudgers
Two users at $2/month is not as profitable as one user at $4/month because there is an overhead per user.

Obvious ones like the fixed portion of a credit card transaction fee.

Less obvious ones like customer support.

And of course segmenting the market between customers with money and the extremely price sensitive is a proven business strategy.

antifa
I thought this was going to be about SaaS/PaaS type stuff. I've seen a lot of free tiers that seemed generous for pre-launch work, but instead of charging me $1/month for a dollar's worth of usage over the free tier, they have cliff based pricing where exceeding the free tier pushes you off into $25/month plan, then the next cliff is $75 or $500. Or worse, they adverse $X per "seat" with small letters saying minimum 5 seats.

These are products or services I genuinely want to pay for, but if my usage is essentially only the first $1 out of the required $25, I'm going to just use a $5 VPS for the same or higher specs.

paulmendoza
Price sensitive users are also the worst customers. They complain the most, want discounts, want the most support even though they are paying very little and then want refunds or dispute charges.
speedgoose
I’m just guessing, I don’t want to conduct a scientific study on this topic, that:

- $5 per month seems very cheap to IT people in USA.

- they think that if someone is willing to pay, $2 or $5 dollars makes no difference to the customer because it’s so little anyway.

I wonder how these companies do their market studies.