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Comment by luke_s | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I feel the same way about the $14 a month.

Perhaps a "one shot access pass" or something that lets you in for a few months while you do financial planning may be useful.

It might also be a good opportunity to check back in with people later (say in 12 months time) and get them to sign up again, if you can provide them with valuable insights and help them stick to their plan

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Do you feel like it's more the price or the billing frequency options that affect the psychology here? To me, a month of planning for the price of a cocktail sounds about right (esp. when compared with traditional advisory services), but perhaps others think in different terms. Or just disagree? haha.

Interestingly, I still get messages fairly often from new users that (in their opinion) pricing is actually too low... so I wonder if more pricing / feature tiers could eventually be helpful to appeal to the different segments.

On the other hand, mind where and who those people are. $14 is probably peanuts for a wealthy software engineer living the SV life and a 6 digit salary, so if those are the ones writing, no surprise they might think like that. Nothing wrong with making them your target audience, of course.

But in other places, $6 can already buy you a cocktail :-D

Pricing is a super tricky issue, especially when its for something related to financials. I think there are plenty of people who wouldn't bat an eye at $14p/m (and maybe they are the target audience), but there are also plenty of people who aren't buying $14 cocktails.

I fall into the camp where I like to play around with spreadsheets (free -£time) or other online calculators (free) just to make loose projections and see where I'm at. I make a good salary (for the UK) but don't pay for any financial advice (and probably wouldn't unless my situation got really complicated). I think if it was priced at £30-50 a year or £4-5p/m I (personally) might go for premium because the tool is honestly really great!

One completely different avenue you might consider is to selling direct to companies to provide to this a service to their employees. I'm not talking financial companies, but more as part of the benefit package. My company added something to their benefits, called bippit - which is awful (or at least not useful to me), but provides virtual one-one financial advisors and some very basic online tools.

Would you fall into the camp of "make it universally cheaper"? Or carve up the feature set into more tiers with different prices? Curious how you would divvy things up, if the latter.

I do also grant general discounts on request (info on pricing page).

You're probably right about the enterprise / benefits angle, but at the moment I wouldn't have a clue how to actually go about it. Enterprise sales is the kind of thing I always imagined you might need a team (and a lot of time and pitching) to pull off... True or false?

I’m speaking as someone who has never had to price anything. To me it feels like a service that doesn’t give me monthly benefit (i.e. frequent recurring usage like my iCloud storage or Netflix etc) as I wouldn’t use it often enough, so paying monthly just feels like a waste to me. The difference between monthly rate if bought as a year and per month is pretty big to incentivise people to pay up for a full year - I personally dislike this strategy, it implies to me that I have to pay a 50% markup just to have the option to change my mind after a month or two (to me this implies I might, so best to get all the money up front).

I think you want to incentivise long term ownership of the product (MRR->YRR) with a focusing of the price at yearly. It aligns more with financial years / tax filings and the general cadence of people looking at their finances.

Now as I say I have absolutely no experience and haven’t done any market analysis. So this is just my opinion.

The problem for me is how rarely you'd use it. I could see myself buying this, and using it forever, but only a few times a year. Monthly pricing for quarterly or semi-annual check ins doesn't feel like the right trade off. (I say this as someone who uses Actual Budget monthly).

I looked at your lifetime subscription and was keen on that for the reasons above but $500USD is eye watering.

I think for me it's about the ongoing nature of the subscription. Everything is a subscription model these days, and I'm quite wary of "zombie" subscriptions that take money every month, but I don't actually use them.

For me financial planning feels like a "once every 5 years" process with possible lightweight annual check ins to see how I'm tracking towards the plan and tweek some details. A monthly subscription doesn't map well to this model. This is why I suggested something like an "access pass" might be a better fit for somebody like me.

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