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Who is your customer? Are you selling to a journalist that uses your app to write every day? Are your customers athletes that exercise 3 times a week? Then yes,

Who is your customer? Are you selling to a journalist that uses your app to write every day? Are your customers athletes that exercise 3 times a week? Then yes, go for it, charge for a subscription. Or do you have a long tail of „casual users“? Bloggers that write an article or two every month. Casual runners that want to track their weekend runs. Someone who wants to touch up vacation photos once a year. Then a subscription is unsuitable. Casual users will pay once for a premium app, especially if they expect to use it for a long time. But its gonna be hard to convince them to pay a monthly fee. Most apps will have a mix of regular and casual users. Just make sure to think of the different audiences your app has. Your business model will decide which of them you can keep.

koolba 9y ago
> Casual users will pay once for a premium app, especially if they expect to use it for a long time. But its gonna be hard to convince them to pay a monthly fee. I don't think so. It may not be as easy to convince as "just $1!" but I bet the customers will come. I also think they'll forget to cancel. That's where the real casual money is. Thousands of customers oblvious to the monthly fees. It's like gym memberships but without the high pressure sales tactics. The customer signs up, uses it for a a week, then gets billed monthly for the next year.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Are you promoting stealing people's money using the gym-membership model? It sounds like you are. That model is what you come to when you realise burglary doesn't scale.
  - koolba 9y ago
    > Are you promoting stealing people's money using the gym-membership model? It sounds like you are. I'm not promoting it. I'm calling it out as the natural progression of switching to a subscription model. When a customer sees "$1/month" vs. "$12/once" what they're really seeing is "$1" vs "$12". The apps on a subscription model will win out. > That model is what you come to when you realise burglary doesn't scale. It's not subscription themselves that are bad. It's selling a product that relies on your customer not using the product to be profitable. Limited space in the gym leads to overcrowding which incentives them to not have you come. The less you come, the less crowded it looks, the easier it is for them to sell memberships (i.e. subscriptions).

koolba 9y ago

> Casual users will pay once for a premium app, especially if they expect to use it for a long time. But its gonna be hard to convince them to pay a monthly fee. I don't think so. It may not be as easy to convince as "just $1!" but I bet the customers will come. I also think they'll forget to cancel. That's where the real casual money is. Thousands of customers oblvious to the monthly fees. It's like gym memberships but without the high pressure sales tactics. The customer signs up, uses it for a a week, then gets billed monthly for the next year.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Are you promoting stealing people's money using the gym-membership model? It sounds like you are. That model is what you come to when you realise burglary doesn't scale.
- koolba 9y ago
  > Are you promoting stealing people's money using the gym-membership model? It sounds like you are. I'm not promoting it. I'm calling it out as the natural progression of switching to a subscription model. When a customer sees "$1/month" vs. "$12/once" what they're really seeing is "$1" vs "$12". The apps on a subscription model will win out. > That model is what you come to when you realise burglary doesn't scale. It's not subscription themselves that are bad. It's selling a product that relies on your customer not using the product to be profitable. Limited space in the gym leads to overcrowding which incentives them to not have you come. The less you come, the less crowded it looks, the easier it is for them to sell memberships (i.e. subscriptions).