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Comment by scentedmeat | Hacker News Reader

I really dislike the 'per month' monetization. I would rather be able to buy the decks that I'm interested in.

What do you think is a fair price for one of our 3000 word language decks? In the previous iteration of the app, people showed themselves willing to pay $15.

Repeat revenue makes it easier for me to make a living as an indie dev, so I wanted to give this model a try while charging what I think is a fair price. I'll keep an open mind about it and adjust if enough people want it. Appreciate the feedback!

> Repeat revenue makes it easier for me to make a living as an indie dev

Of course it does! "And a pony."

You have to realize that most people are exceptionally leery of subscriptions as they are open-ended long-term commercial relationships with some random entity. There gotta be rock-solid clear benefits for a subscription to be justified. There are none in your case. What you have is a product, not a service. A subscription makes no sense whatsoever.

With regards to the fixed pricing - 3000 word pack is not the best option. What's more useful from the language learners perspective are packs that cover specific domain area - foods, kitchen utensils, car parts, body parts, weather elements, household tools, etc.

"3000 words" = "Unclear what you are getting"

"100 words, Garage" = "I may be able talk to the mechanic"

If you have smaller packs, you can sell them at few bucks a piece. You can try and experiment with discounted bundles of packs. And you can also try an all-you-can-eat option with a monthly access (yes, subscription), but as one of the options, not the only one.

PS. Have an option of switching off photos on cards.

I don't think domain specific packs are very useful for language learners. You need a rather large vocabulary just to follow a normal everyday conversation. Basic conversation and reading skill are the foundation upon which you can build. You need to consume and produce a large amount of material in your target language if you want to master it.

Buying the language a few hundred words at a time won't get you to fluency as quickly as learning words by frequency until you have covered the most frequent ~80%. Only then does it make sense to focus on specific domains that are most interesting to you.

Actually, it does make sense to have packs that are structured in a particular way.

For example, I am learning German. I would rather have a pack with the 25 most frequent nouns, 25 most frequent verbs, and maybe 25 most frequent adjectives. Then I have a foundation of vocabulary to learn the dativ and akkusativ. I don't need the adverbs yet.

Also, if I'm learning the modal verbs, I'd like a pack of those.

Domain packs are not for those who are trying to master a language, but those who are starting up and merely need to pick up some day-to-day vocabulary quickly.

So I googled "And a Pony" and it looks like one of the first uses of it is from a coding horror page in 2006 where the guy is asking all websites to scale down properly for a phone and then scale up properly for a desktop. He's then ridiculed because asking such a thing from websites would be obviously impossible. (Remember: 2006.) It is now of course expected everywhere.

I just think that's interesting in the context of your use here.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/and-a-pony/

That's just a general expression. It's certainly older than 2006 and its context is not related to the IT at all, e.g. see https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70640/meaning-of...

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