Hey all, there's a lot of web stuff and tools I'd love to make that I think would honestly be worth a small subscription ($5/mo maybe). I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?
I see a lot of success stories but I don't know how much they can be trusted. Those of you who have built small single-use indie tools, do you find that anybody at all actually subscribes? A lot of the stuff I wanna try involves AI so I'd have to make sure subscription profits offset the cost of providing free demos.
If a web tool saves me and my team at work a bit of time for $5/month, yes, 100%, swipe the company card! Sure let’s buy another JS table library.
But if I’m working on a personal project, or I have to pay for said tool with my personal card, probably not. I’ll spend the time building my own solution from scratch while never actually finishing my project.
The last company we signed up to our service took 3 months and at least 4 hours of paperwork, I personally wanted to just tell them to go somewhere else but we kept getting emails from the dev team saying sorry
Just the licensing/subscription mess can be detraction if now your company have to tell your client that they need to pay for some 3rd party thing, even if your client have no problems with it it can take months if bureaucracy machine is slow
When I was working at Cisco, the general rule was to get manager approval and just go for it. Of course, these days, there are security concerns but for most cases, it's not a problem.
In a different company, it was sooo hard to get anything that they refused to buy JetBrains IntelliJ and forced us to use Eclipse. Most of us ended up buying it ourselves.
SourceHut, I don't use as much as I'd like, but the build and chat services keeps me paying. It's cheap, and I get a lot of enjoyment from using it.
I think if you do these types of services, then you really need to make sure that people feel good about using your service. I know that's a tricky and rather fluffy goal, but you either need to be REALLY good and then you can charge more than $5, or you can make people feel good and if the amount is low, it becomes an easy renewal next month/year.
If you're making a tool, fixed price for the current version, upgrade price for the next version, no subscription. I think we're at a point in time where your target audience would rather fork over $25 right now and then get a license, but would be hard press to give you $5 per month, even for a single month.
Make that stiff because doing what you love is doing what you love.
$5/mo
As a business, that is a terrible price. It is not enough money to provide good service and outsource all the things that should be outsourced. [1] Even worse good potential customers know this and bad potential customers don’t care if your business is unsustainable.
[1]: At five bucks a month you will need thousands of customers to cover one well-paid employee [2} focused on customer service, but acquiring, retaining, and servicing thousands of customers probably requires more than one full-time employee…
[2]: Of course if you are doing what you love, then being paid well might not matter. But unless you love solving billing problems, you will be doing some things you don’t love. But being well paid to do what you love is not bad.
That being said, also $5 is a terrible price. People who pay too much attention to people who post on web forums get gun shy and are afraid to discover what people are actually willing to pay for things.
Everyone who has ever raised their prices has said consistently that a) the number of people who left was below their expectations and b) the people who left were overwhelmingly their most complaining customers who caused the most support burden.
As I've grown older, I like to pay for things that make my life more efficient. Even if they are a subscription, and even if I feel like everything unfortunately has turned into a subscription and even if I feel like it should be cheaper. Hacking or finding workarounds to achieve the same thing for free is just not worth my time, and I value my time and boundaries more as I age.
These days AI will probably build most of the things you'd charge a tiny fee for. $5/month is kind of the rate of a battle pass for a MMO, not quite a "small tool".
$5 a month works for apps with huge user bases and they just take the small conversion and that makes their business run. And this is never web apps (certainly not new ones because the easy ones already exist).
If you charge $30-$100 a month you have to find 10 times less people which is way way easier for a small web dev. Yes the problem you solve will have to be more acute but a. There are actually loads of rich people out there - more than you think and b. You now basically only have to build for your most committed users.
See 1000 True Fans for better, fuller explanation: https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/