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Comment by yaseer | Hacker News Reader

Hey, thanks!

Yeah, so pricing is opaque because in all honestly, we're still figuring things out.

We're unlikely to lift pricing and annoy users. If anything, we're extending the free trial for most users, and may introduce a cheaper tier too.

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Cheaper tier would be great. I can think of some things I could use this for that are not 50$/mo things. Scraping personal finance, automating personal blog etc. but I definitely understand a startup needing to figure out pricing

Cool, by way of a quick survey on HN, how much would you pay in a cheaper tier?

You're not asking me, but if home users are a target market then it would have to be $1 - $3 dollars per month. I could imagine scraping local events websites, banks, maybe online auctions, etc. When home users subscribed to one or two services, we could get away with $10 monthly. Now, with home users accustomed to $1 apps and subscribing to a dozen different services, $3 is about the maximum before signups drop significantly.

On a public forum the question was open to anyone - thanks for sharing your thoughts!

There does seem to be a strong argument to introduce a cheaper tier for consumer use-cases.

You could charge based on some metric of use, as opposed to an all you can eat style charge. $50 is very prohibitive if I used this to automate a task that'll earn me $20/month.

There's definitely going to be a usage based metric to pricing in the long-run.

The problem now is that the obvious metric ('bot runs') is too crude for a DIY bot-builder, and may stop users during development.

It's very likely our pricing system will evolve to resemble zapier's multiple tiers - they have the closest business model to ours. We're basically "The Zapier of RPA".

I would say it is impossible to make any business model work charging $1 to $3 per month.

$3/mo is $36/year, most templates on themeforest and other platforms are around that price and they are selling fine. Considering the code is running on the user's side, the marginal cost for low-tier customers is probably minimal.

Though I disagree with "impossible" I will mention that those $1 - $3 customers will likely have an order of magnitude more support costs. Business users will be people who can figure things out. Home users ask constant questions and require constant babysitting.

If you're considering a really low price point like $5/mo, you might be better suited charging businesses more and then having a free tier that's restricted to personal use in some way (e.g. license or no collaboration)

+1 for personal finance. If I could use this to build my own Mint in a Google Sheet, or scrape Mint, and do so in a manner that did not introduce additional security issues beyond what I'd face writing my own Selenium scraper, I'd pay $5-$10/mo for this and know others who would as well. Bonus if output was consumable via API.

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