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Comment by yaseer | Hacker News Reader

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

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)

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.

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