Upcoming Pricing Increase for New Users

To help grow Kinopio to financial sustainability, In about a month I’ll be increasing the cost of upgrading your account to $5/mo, and also adding a $55/yr option.

If you’ve already upgraded – or if you upgrade soon – you’ll be grandfathered into your current price of $4/mo forever.

Thoughts? I figure most of the people on this forum are upgraded so this won’t affect you, but with new user eyes on how do you feel about this? is 5$ too high, too low?

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from the perspective of a somewhat new user (since late Dec)
I think $5 is justified considering there are more tools and functionality constantly being added.

but for most software, customers think that services with subscription models have too much leverage in terms of improving the service from what I’ve read on reddit posts and youtube comments about productivity tools, as well as 3D art and video/image editting softwares like C4D, Adobe suite, RedGiant etc

hope this helps

Can you clarify this part? What do you mean by ‘leverage’ here? thx

i’ve read these comments on an overview of RedGiant VFX and i’ve read similar sentiments at Notion’s reddit page.

granted these software charge considerably more than kinopio’s reasonable pricing, i’d say some things apply to many subscription based models for software and i hope it gives you some insight on what people think of subscriptions.

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Some quick thoughts here (disclaimer: I’ve never tried to run a software business, or any business at all, but I do subscribe to things, write software, and watch Shark Tank):

  • I think $5/month is very reasonable and such a small difference from $4 that I don’t think it would be a deal-breaker for people wanting to subscribe.
  • Regarding pushback against subscriptions: it seems like the tide is turning in public sentiment. Software has long been not shrink-wrapped but finally in the past years, we’ve seen a stream of apps use subscriptions. From the business perspective, it makes total sense. Software costs money to maintain. And people are used to subscribing to almost everything these days: coffee, streaming video, music, clothes even. But more to the point, most software these days, from Adobe to the indie developer (tweetbot, darkroom, bear, kinopio :wave:t2: @pirijan).
  • For me it comes down to trust. I think pirijan has done a good job of garnering that trust through basically being a human being online and very transparent about the business. The proposition is simple: he’s trying to make software that people dig and are willing to pay for so that he can keep doing the thing.
  • Another model out there is Patreon. Also a subscription, but it’s more about supporting the creator/artist. Kinopio has that feel (hopefully that doesn’t offend). I could see having different tiers/levels of support. What about offering one-time support things, like buy-me-a-coffee, or selling sticker packs, stuff like that. Again, this is probably naive of me, and maybe not what the business needs right now. I’m sure you’ve done the math of how much you have to grow, users and pricing to be sustainable, etc. :slight_smile:
  • The value I get out of Kinopio is that it helps me organize and think about my academic, professional, and personal/spiritual life. Particularly, it has really helped with writing papers, preparing essays and discussions, and helped me be a good leader on my team.
  • For reference, here are some of my other subscriptions: Day One, Weather Line, Apple Music, Due, Overcast, Bear. I don’t use Bear sub features much, so I might let that expire.
  • I want Kinopio to succeed :yellow_heart:

ℬ℮ℕ

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:sweat_drops: ya stepping back a bit to the concept of subscriptions itself, I definitely understand the negative sentiments around subscriptions. And it’s made worse by some companies that make it easy to sign up and hard to cancel.

10 years ago it used to be able to sell professional software for a single cost, but those days are over:

  • Software, even those made by individuals, commonly used to cost 60$ and up. With the rise of app stores (primarily by apple commodifying software to sell hardware), consumer expectations are that consumer software should cost < 5$ or be free (and sell your data).
  • Software used to be run solely on your computer and distributed as fat binaries on CDs. This made it easy to sell version 1, and then next year sell you a version 2 with fancy new features. But software on the web (especially collaborative software) requires ongoing server costs and is delivered continuously in tiny pieces every day/week
  • It’s a myth (also started by apple) that you’ll just make up lower prices with volume. More volume requires more marketing, which also costs money and time.

In a way, it’s a lose-lose scenario. improving and maintaining non-trivial software on the web requires a subscription – or a single-time fee equivalent to 2-3 years of service (too much to charge in today’s market imo)

I general, I think you should use the product, but buy the creators.

e.g. Although I used loved Illustrator (was one of the finest pieces of software ever made imo), Adobe was a garbage company with a monopoly and no incentive to innovate well before they switched to subscriptions.

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Yo, sorry to bump.

On the pricing page: How Much Does Kinopio Cost? (Pricing)

The text ($5) doesn’t match the screenshot ($4)

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thx for the catch,
updating the image

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Noticed a trend in the App Store where apps are putting a pretty high price monthly, but their yearly comes in at a steep discount relative to the monthly.

Example: $10/mo vs $35/yr

Not sure if it’s a successful or sustainable approach, but thought I’d point it out in case there is data that might support this as a better model given how widespread it seems anecdotally (have not done the research myself though…)

Could also depend on the audience too, but thought it was interesting… an example for Kinopio based on this model and how you’ve approached it lately could be $8/mo or $60/yr to make the annual pricing even more enticing.

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That’s because apple reduces their cut for yearly subscriptions after the first year (from 30 to 10% I think) - so apps are incentivized to overprice for monthly and really push you to yearly. Kinopio doesn’t have those incentives , so i price both the monthly and yearly at a fair price and am happy no matter which you choose

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Ahhhh that makes complete sense

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