Why does it cost 9 USD per month? (Unless you self host)
It is a genuine question.
You say that as if they won't anyway.
>The site does not currently and will never show ads. It also does not, and don't intend to, sell data to a third party, with or without your consent. We are just against this. Fuck ads.
But maybe I'm overlooking something. Hence me asking.
A comparable personal product would normally be freemium, but very limited in storage space and events number. And then, for US/European markets you’d have a $0.x per month subscription, to lift that limit. Asking early adopters to pitch in more (maybe for some token appreciation or special treatment/logo) also makes a lot of sense.
(Take this with a lot of salt, I easily can be very wrong in any of the above).
It was a genuine questions from me.
I'm in Montreal, Alexis is in Paris. The cost of living in these cities is pretty high. We have families. So let's say we need to bring in $100 000 CAD per year.
9$ per month ~= 8$ after Stripe taxes. Then 35% off from the government. If I'm extra generous and lucky from the taxes, we get 5$ per subscription.
Then we need to substract the costs of hosting on a PAAS for 40 000 users. Let's say it's an extra $. So we have 4$ per subscription.
If we need to bring 200 000 $ CAD at least to live decently with our families, we would need 50 000 paying users. That is without the churn, right, which is pretty high currently at 8%.
7 years later: we don't even have 500 paying users
The dream of working full time on Monica is still there, but without VC money, I don't know how we could achieve this.
You can try setting the thing up, so the costs are essentially static and do not depend on the number of users. This seem possible, since it doesn’t look like you store images or do anything heavy. You also do not need moderation, it seems.
If you think it should cost less because of N reasons -- self host it. There's an option for that vs. other solutions.
They don't need to justify their cost to you, ever, but especially when it's open sourced with an option to self host.
Correct. I'm just *wondering* why they choose that price. I don't want them to change it and they have every right to not talk about it.
I selfhost a lot of stuff. I don't understand why people think this is an attack.
(/s)