Arriving at the price point
In late June / early July we experimented with pricing before releasing our more successful Casual plan at the beginning of August.
When I launched 2.0 I knew people would need to feel extra charitable if they were going to become a paying user. We provide most of our value gratis, largely in the name of a frictionless user experience*, and had added some new paid functionality that most people could live without. Still I launched the Pro plan to make sure everyone knew the product was meant to be self-sustaining and that the business model was finally in place.
In the short months since then I've stepped back from the product to reflect on what we were actually offering users. We have a great writing experience on nice, native mobile apps: great. We enable people to accomplish something without bogging them down in bullshit marketing goals: awesome. Those are very valuable things that people might pay for. But to start charging would be to give up the aspects that have helped Write.as grow organically for the past 18 months.
So I'm glad we've hit a price point that more people are happy paying today. Now that we've arrived at it, my focus is back on finishing our various apps/clients to complete the 2.0 update across the platform. Android is up next, and it's looking really good.
Until next time.
* And that experience, to be frank, trumps all design/business goals besides our privacy ones. Stay tuned to see if this becomes our downfall.