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Comment by ganashaw | Hacker News Reader

I spent about 6 months building Itinee (https://itinee.com) which is a trip planning app focused on being budget conscious. I built it because my wife and I love to travel but my assortment of spreadsheets was a little intimidating to her. I wanted a platform that let us both participate in the planning process. Unfortunately, due to COVID, people aren't traveling so I haven't really put any money into marketing it or done any more development on it. I might revisit it once things get back to normal. I don't plan to do much more development until I get user feedback, though

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Looks quite interesting. I'm curious if market product fit is there, you are trying to sell an app to people who are looking to travel cheaply.

Does your app offer some kind of incentive for use. Perhaps utilize data from other users to suggest how much certain city/trip should cost. If you need data for that, it might be a good idea to offer the app for free/freemium. Perhaps for free you can do planning but with premium you get further insight for average cost of a specific trip or even suggestions for trips of various types/cost.

My grand vision is actually a "trip itinerary search engine" so people can search for "Barcelona for 2 people for $1000 or less" and get all the matching itineraries.

But yes, as you so rightly pointed out, such analytics is only possible with a user base, which I've been struggling to acquire (admittedly, I haven't tried very hard). A free model may be a good way to go to build that user base initially, and may be something I explore, but I didn't want to give something away if people WOULD pay for it.

One thing I've considered, if I do go down this route, is that free users' trips are public (or mostly, I would try to censor dates/residential locations) while premium users can make private trips or something like that.

Overall, I've gotten a lot of feedback on this thread to reconsider the pricing/monetization strategy, so it's definitely something I need to look at.

How'd you come to the pricing model? To me only having 24 hours before losing data would probably preclude me from putting effort into trying it out. Have you thought at all about a freemium model?

I gotpartway through building a travel planning app a few years ago, and I had thought the best way could be to allow 3 trips to be planned, then your trial ends unless you subscribe. Or you could severely limit the functionality in a perpetually free version while the paid version has all the bells and whistles.

All the best for when travel is common again as I really like this idea and think there’s untapped potential.

Yeah, the issue I see with something like that is that realistically, someone could easily take several years to take 3 trips.. seems a bit tricky to convert free customers to paying customers.

Thanks for the feedback and well wishes!

Pretty much by waving my finger in the air :) I originally started with something subscription based, but it felt a bit inflexible. For example, if I offered 6mo subscriptions, people probably wouldn't purchase a subscription if they were planning a trip to take in the next month, because you're "wasting" 5mo.

Now, it could be that my prices are too high, but that was sort of my rationale--I thought it would be better to let people pay for what they need.

I think a freemium model could work, but at this point I don't think I have any real features that would meaningfully distinguish the free version from the paid version. I did consider limiting like the number of days your trip can be for "free" users--I might revisit this in the future.

Really appreciate the feedback!

I would be the target audience, but from the front page I don't see what value it brings over a spreadsheet. I won't register just to found out that. Does it automatically calculate travel costs?

Thanks for the feedback! In my view, these are some of the biggest advantages of Itinee over my previous spreadsheet planning:

- Visualize everything on a map. This is big for me just to help organize what days it makes the most sense to do things - Estimate travel costs (e.g. Ride sharing) based on distances between stops - Easily adjust number of attendees. Some costs are split regardless of how many people attend, like hotel rooms, while others are a fixed per person price, like event tickets - Ease of use for someone NOT familiar with spreadsheets. My wife couldn't replicate any of this in a spreadsheet, but she can use Itinee.

Some of the above may in fact, and probably is, possible with some fancy spreadsheet shenanigans, but the main point was to make the whole process more accessible.

I'd be really curious if the advantages I mentioned weren't apparent on the website or if they simply weren't, in your view, "enough" of an improvement over a spreadsheet to justify paying for it.

Estimate travel costs weren't apparent from the front page, there is no mention of it and the example plan (picture) only use walking.

I just found the Chicago itinerary in the blog post. It should be accessible from the front page.

I don't see enough value added over spreadsheets / custom Google maps to worth the money, but I'm pretty happy with our current system.

This is great feedback! I definitely think it's a harder sell for someone who already has a system that works for them.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Happy new year!

Interesting concept, although the pricing structure seems at odds with budgeting. I would say 6-month or 12-month subscription blocks make more sense to allow for planning and budgeting.

Thanks for the feedback! Pricing is not my forte. My thought process was basically this:

- In general, people are probably only planning a single trip at a time (an exception might be if travel agents were to be interested)

- Based on that assumption, it came down to what resolution of access people would want. With the current model, 6 months of editing access comes down to $35. I could, equivalently, just charge $35 for 6mo of access, but in my head, I thought people would be more likely to actually give it a shot if the barrier to entry were cheaper (in this case $10).

So it could be that my actual price is just too high (i.e. $35/6mo of editing access is too much). I haven't gotten much feedback one way or another on this (though one could argue that the lack of purchases could be seen as pretty clear feedback). I've just read that founders tend to underprice their SaaS services, so I was wary of starting too low.

How about something like a quasi-log scale, e.g.,: $19 for 6 weeks, $39 for 6 months, $79 for 12 months and $99 for three years?

That could work! I'm curious what makes subscription models more attractive from your point of view. Is it just simpler to understand? It seems strictly less flexible than a pay-for-what you need model. I suppose in your example the advantage is that you can get a discount by paying for more up front which is a clear advantage for people who will take multiple trips in a year or are planning a trip far in advance.

They're suggesting a pricing model from the perspective of running this business instead of a pricing model from the perspective of using this service. Subscriptions are worth way more to a (tech) business than one-off purchases.

I received a similar suggestion years ago from someone else, and it worked very well. It's effectively bigger discounts for longer & larger service plans up front. I found it effectively shifted the conversation from "How can I get a discount /beat you up on your price?" to "Ok, what is the right plan for our project"?

This is not quite like consulting/custom dev gigs, but has similar attributes. For purchases/subscriptions like yours, I've noticed that they often seem to create a tension between buying the two most likely to meet your needs - the longer higher-cost one is priced just low enough to be tempting. This probably indicates a lot of A/B testing of pricing, and decisions about whether you want to make it easier for your customers to decide, pointing customers to one plan or the other, what really drives higher purchasing levels and overall income.

Good luck!

I'm coming at it from someone who does regular budgeting and subscribes to software for that. Big communities built around that so there is potential also.

The pricing comes off as aimed at those planning big one-off trips not regular annual vacation. Those one-off trips are nice, but would be more sporadic and wouldn't you prefer a regular annual subscribing user over a one-off?

It generally costs more to gain a new customer.

At $35 for 6 months, that would be $70 annually if I wanted that. As what I'd consider an "add-on" product, it's far too much. Maybe something like $4.5/m or $45/yr.

Yes! Budgeter here as well :) My YNAB subscription is well worth it, BUT I use YNAB at least weekly. That was a big struggle I had with coming up with a pricing model that made sense here--realistically, it seems like most/many people will only be actively using Itinee for relatively brief periods of time throughout the year, which, at least if I were the customer, would make me wary of long subscriptions.

As a developer/founder I absolutely would prefer regular subscriptions to sporadic one-offs, I just doubt(ed) if people would actually signup for that.

I certainly agree that transitioning to a subscription model would require lower prices to be feasible and may be sufficient to get people on board with "wasting" their subscription for 75% of the year.

As a tangent, I find that it's really hard to get this kind of feedback from real/potential customers (like yourself!) but such feedback is incredibly valuable (thank you!). I wonder if there's a market for some service where I could pay $100 for 3 people to go to my landing page, try my product (free of cost to them, obviously) and then be open to some conversation about their experience. It seems like there could be a market for that given the "Indie Hacker" boom. Maybe such a thing already exists.

> To save your changes, purchase a trip slot for as low as $10

Yet the price directly to the right of that says "Trip Slot $5".

Thanks for the catch! I updated the language to "...purchase a trip slot and editing access for as low as $10"

Your comment makes me wonder if it would be clearer to present things as "Trip slot + first month of editing access = $10" and "Each additional month of editing access = $5" or similar.

Ah, I see, that makes more sense. I had not realised that a "trip slot" was a read only thing although on reflection that's pretty obvious. I thought the monthly price was unlimited slots...but that makes no sense given it's the same price.

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