The Case for a Monthly “Subscription” Price

I downloaded Agenda only a few days ago, but I’ve already filled it out with info related to my work developing iOS apps. It’s a great environment for that.

Before I started writing this topic, I searched the community for “subscription.” I love that the reasoning for the one-time price ($9.99 or $24.99) is: You keep what you paid for when time runs out. You only miss out on new features after that.

I’m really into that. I might take inspiration from you folks if it’s really working out for you.

However, for me, justifying a one-time purchase of $24.99 to my girlfriend is a big ask. (She just doesn’t understand the value of software.) If there were a similar deal that gave you only one month of premium features and updates, it’s a much easier pill for her to swallow.

$25 divided into 12 months is roughly $2/month. If you charged $2.99 or $3.99 a month it would be a no-brainer decision for me to jump in. I’m also guessing I’m not alone.

If you made the $2.99/$3.99 tier more like the typical auto-renewing subscriptions out there you could intentionally allow this tier to be the one where stopping payment equals removal of features. Doing this would uphold the $24.99 tier as the one true Agenda fanboy’s tier. In some cases, if you went auto-renewing for monthly, you would also get the better 85%/15% cut after one year.

In the end though, I’m just selfishly asking for a tier I can afford more on a near-term basis. Eventually, maybe, I can splurge the rest at once.

Thanks for making that case, I can totally see your point, but still adding monthly subscriptions would just make things more complicated and would not fit with a lot of the philosophies @drewmccormack describes in the below blog post about the rationale behind our model:

In the end we trust on the fact that your girlfriend can just use Agenda without the premium features for quite a while until one day she realises she has been getting a lot of value out of Agenda and that it’s worth paying something for being able to get even more from a tool she already likes.

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