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Comment by adrianmsmith | Hacker News Reader

The blog post says 810 paid subscribers, and the price was $4/month so that's $3.2k/month.

I mean that's not bad, that sounds like they'd nearly made it. Maybe they'd need 2-3x that to live off (depending where they live). But if they got that far I sort of feel they might have been able to make it. Then they wouldn't need any other job, they could just live off the product. And then any additional revenue growth would be profit.

I mean they were a lot closer to it being able to sustain them than a business with e.g. $0/month revenue, or e.g. 3 users at $10/month (I've worked for a few such projects without product/market..)

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There’s a chance they just needed to raise the price. I wonder how people land on something like $4. At that price your demand for something like this is not price sensitive. $5 and you have 20% growth, $8 and you’ve doubled. To the users it’s just a few bucks.

Moreover, everything on the website implies that Actual was a high-end, exactingly designed product for discerning, well-off people. But it was priced like general-audience commodity SaaS. My guess is that most subscribers would have been more than willing to pay, say, 20 dollars a month instead of 4, particularly for something that has "saving you lots of money" as a core value proposition.

It's open source... We could try. :D

The thing is, YNAB increased pricing recently and that didn't went well, it caused a pretty negative outlash... Actual was actually a pretty good alternative that was pushed by many people on Reddit, they got quite a bit of free advertising through that. Yearly YNAB is only 8.25$ a month and support syncing through Plaid (which add a few dollars per month for sure to the cost and it also add quite a bit of negative feedback sadly). So yeah he could increase the price for sure, but not by much, and his current customers wouldn't appreciate it that much considering they jumped ship to avoid a price increase in the first place.

I feel like Actual should have way more users, but people were waiting to switch from YNAB until it had every unnecessary feature added. If they knew that postponing their subscription would end in the service shutting down, maybe they would have chosen differently? Actual is completely usable, and reliable as it is. I'm sad that it ended in burnout this way, it is such a good product.

would it have been possible to sell the code and business? the author doesn't mention that he explored that option. This seems very sellable. And like you said, $3.2k/month could go long way in other countries. So it would have been cool to find a buyer/partner who could be aligned with the vision and values of the author.

they mentioned that they need to hire 2 people. so that's a pretty low gross for that. and the expense of running the servers and all that is not included there so net was probably wildly insufficient for that kind of newhire. I'd think spending some money on marketing would have been more prudent.

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