As a user of Flow for the past few weeks, I've been blown away by its UI and usefulness. Unfortunately, the pricing seems a bit steep for personal use. I'd also like to see some clarity on how pricing works with groups of people.
It seems to me Flow pricing is learning a valuable lesson from MobileMe: if it's useful, people will pay.
I pay for MobileMe b/c it gives me true over-the-air contact/calendar sync on my iPhone. If another solution came around, I might consider it, but could it be free? And if not free, less than $10/mo?
I also pay for Flickr for purely personal use, b/c I want to be able to share my photos and let my friends/family download full-res files.
120$ buys a lot of egg salad sandwiches.
If you're using it to help generate income, then it's a tiny price to pay. But the demo video shows "planning a party" as a use case and that can be done almost as effectively for $0 using email.
That's where the disconnect is. You seem to think that $10/mo is not expensive for anything in life.
I respectfully disagree. There are probably an infinite number of things for which $10/mo is too expensive, independent of how much money you actually have.
Would you pay me $10/mo to have me send you a random Mark Twain quote as a push notification to your device every day?
I'm not trying to nitpick - only pointing out that your worldview and ideas of what you would pay for don't match that of many/most people.
It seems to me Flow pricing is learning a valuable lesson from MobileMe
Not sure that MobileMe is the best example of this lesson.
Their video (and pricing) seems to indicate this.
For running a business that requires coordination among many people, the price is utterly reasonable (if not slightly cheap).
From the screenshots, it seems like it should be possible to have a cheaper capped-to-a-small-set-of-collaborators version that a family of 3-6 could use, but still charge business prices for more/arbitrary collaborators and other features.
(I have a friend who's been looking for a good app to coordinate family tasks with his wife; iPhone apps and simplicity/speed/reliability of interface are of paramount importance... but integration with web/email/desktop, following-features, and threads are all of negligible importance. Flow looks nice but overkill in features and price for this need.)
MobileMe is also a desktop app though.
Regargless, my point is that there are very few web apps that people pay for to use outside of work.
I think this is becoming (or always has been) a general truth. Customers now expect everything available on the internet to be free. But they're more than happy to pay money for things that aren't on the internet.
Do you pay for any other apps?
However, I do pay for Netflix ($9/month) and TurboTax ($75/year) for non-business use. I used to pay for .Mac, as well.