The idea came about from a pivot from a failed app (http://fs.howcookingworks.com/). In that app, users can take pictures of food, and get nutrition info back. It turns out that the need for nutrition analysis is needed much more in the enterprise space.
The validation of the idea came when pitching my local restaurants if they needed nutrition facts labels. It turns out that one restaurant did. After that, I hit the road visiting all my local farmer's markets and have been and gathered my first set of clients from those visits.
In terms of price sensitivity, current vendors are charging $100-$150 a label, so the subscription plan is either an average deal, or a great deal if they have 5 labels.
The subscription model stems from a problem in purchasing an individual label. If vendors purchase say one label, there is a possibility where they might have made a couple of mistakes and they have to fix their label. The thing is I don't really know if they are fixing the label, or generating an entirely new label. At the end of the day my goal is to be as hands off as possible.
Of course, I'm open to ideas though.
Or you could do like it is done with barcodes, and charge a low fee per label generated. Say $20 for every label with no corrections. Just state it very clearly in there. Twenty dollars is low enough that they won't try and scam you out of things. Plus you can also sell them a package deal where for $99 they can get 6 labels (5+1 free). It will make sense in their heads because the $99 deal seems to be the better value.
So:
$20 per label or $99 for 5 labels plus get one FREE.
Interestingly in answer to your question i'm building an application in the non-developer space as a non developer. I work in the architecture industry & my app is aimed at providing architects, engineers, building contractors and other related fields with an easy way to send and receive drawings and files, and also keep track of revisions to those files. Effectively its a repo for architectural & engineering drawings. I came up with the idea by employing 37 Signals style "scratch your own itch" method. While searching for a solution to replace the tedium of sending through email and local filing that seems commonplace in the industry i found platforms that are similar available for very large scale construction (read 100m, 1b etc) works but didn't scale well enough to be a viable option (price-wise) for small scale to include projects in the order of 500k - 5m etc.
I think that we hear and talk about "scaling" in the start-up community but we often overlook the possibility of building apps that "scale down" features from a much larger successful software. These smaller apps could theoretically have an untapped access to consumers/businesses that are out-priced by larger software systems.
*Edited for clarity
We were approached to provide a quote, which turned out to be too expensive for them. We liked the idea so offered to do this for a 3 way split (two developers) with the understanding he would take care of sales (his background was sales and marketing). The situation changed after this but that's another story.
He originally came up with the idea from his parents who owned a couple of franchise letting agents and used to do this process with paper, pen and a digital camera.
Unfortunately there was no shrink-wrapped solution that could fix our specific problem that supported both Japanese and English, so I ended up designing and having built some software that generated our invoices automatically.
I spent more and more time working on this, until I realised there was a lot of demand for this product, and a real market need.
I met my co-founder (through Hacker News actually), and we decided to build out a multi-tenant solution for the Japanese mass-market.