Day 31: Choosing a price for Hide Feed

sales

Since I wrote the post about getting my first paid customer, I got two more of these bad boys in my inbox:

Thanks Jake and Shiva!!! Getting their subscriptions feels a bit like I’m cheating because they’re close friends of mine, but this is still super special. Thanks for being so supportive and generous. 🙏🏽

With 3 subscribers, revenue is now at $15/month!

In today’s post, I’ll reveal the highly systematic and nuanced process I used to come up with the $5 / month price point for Hide Feed. You ready?

I just chose a number.

Well, there was a tiny bit more thought that I put into it than that, but it’s mostly me just guessing. Here are some of the things that influenced how I chose the price:

Feedback form

On January 17 (about 3 weeks ago; 10 days after I started my private beta), I sent out a feedback form to 24 of my private beta testers, and 12 of them filled out the form. One of the questions asked if they’d pay for Hide Feed:

~60% of respondents said they wouldn’t pay anything, which might seem discouraging, but considering that I’m asking if they’d pay for a Chrome extension (when’s the last time you paid for a Chrome extension or heard of someone paying for one?), I was happy to hear that 5 out of 12 people were willing to pay something for Hide Feed (a monthly subscription, no less! A subscription feels a lot harder to justify than a one-time fee).

Several caveats worth making here:

  • Having someone saying in a survey that they’d pay does not mean they’d actually pay

  • Small and highly biased sample

    • Only 12 respondents
    • All respondents are people who are willing to volunteer to be beta testers (i.e. early adopters)
    • All respondents are friends who I know outside of the Hide Feed beta. They’re much more likely to be generous with their answer.

Given the answers I received, it would’ve been safest for me to go with $1 / month, but I think that would’ve been a disservice to myself:

  • I think Hide Feed provides much more value than $1/month for the people it’s meant for

  • At $1/month, it’d take many, many more paying users before this can be a meaningful business

  • Every single person who gives advice for SaaS businesses says the same exact thing: It’s better to have a smaller number of users who pay more than a larger number of users who pay less

    • You’ll be able to provide much better support for your paying users
    • Users who pay more tend to be much less demanding than users who pay nothing or almost nothing

I originally considered going with $3/month, but seeing that there were at least 2 people willing to pay $5 or more, I decided $5 would work as well.

Reward early supporters

As I continue improving Hide Feed, I think it’s possible that I’ll discover that I can charge more and enough people will still think it’s worth it. At this stage though, I’d rather err on the side of charging too little than charging too much.

I want to reward people who are supporting me early on in my journey, not penalize them. I’d personally find it super lame if I subscribed to something early on and later found that new users are able to get it for less than I did.

…And that’s pretty much it. I just came up with something that felt reasonable and figured I could always change it later.

Pricing Comparisons

Back on Day 9, I analyzed how other Chrome extensions structure their paid plans. I actually didn’t do the following price breakdown before choosing the $5 price point, but I think it’d be interesting to see how much other Chrome extensions charge for monthly subscriptions.

Notes:

  • Obviously, other extensions serve different use cases so seeing their pricing is not necessarily going to be useful for Hide Feed. It’s still interesting to see how other services in this space (browser extension as the primary product) charge.
  • For extensions with multiple plans, I selected the one for individuals (not businesses), paid annually (not monthly).

Prices (highest to lowest)

Seeing that Hide Feed is most similar to Inbox When Ready and Momentum and that it provides useful additions like supporting multiple sites and replacing feeds instead of the new tab, I think $5/month is a fine place to start.