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Comment by ogjunkyard | Hacker News Reader

I thought the same thing.

Current major players in the market I'm going after offer their products/services for free, and niche players offer their products for $5/month or $20/year.

Charging $47+/month is a nonstarter as customers are price conscious.

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You could also take that as a signal it's not a good market to be in?

Depending on how easy it is to find customers, and your goals/options regarding to scale of course.

In this case, serving the market is about scale and no-touch/incredibly-low-touch sales. The companies not charging anything are making money on the backend through data, analytics, and sale of information to 3rd parties. There's definitely money to be made, it just depends on who you are asking for that money from.

Honest question -- are you trying to build a sustainable business on $20/yr per customer? That sounds very ... challenging.

The company operating on the $20/year model offers a very specific feature-product and that's basically the only thing they do. My goal is to have that be one of the features my company offers eventually and do this with a handful of complimentary feature-companies to build something more robust over time, the idea being that I charge something like $10+/month for a set of "premium features".

Could you elaborate?

It seems to me that $20/year could be a good lowest tier price, especially for products targeting individual customers (as opposed to businesses). There are successful solo founder projects in that range (notably pinboard.in, $22/year).

For sure, I agree with this take. My goal is to build a small, lean company that serves one particular market and expand over time.

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