Looking into the cost of translation APIs made me much more receptive to the idea of purchasing a subscription, I just wish I could mix-and-match it, as I'm not likely to use the other features at all.
Yep exactly. For me personally, in line translation is not even worth $4 let alone $8. But if it's a few cents, and there are another few services for a few cents, with true added value that is useful to me, they might get $4 out of me.
As someone else who does a freemium product (16 years and counting, no ads, 100% user supported!) it's very rare for the price of the freemium product to be set by what the features cost you to offer, and everyone who's ever tried a la carte pricing has really (REALLY) regretted it.
What you do instead is look at what it costs you to run the site and what percentage of people you think will pay you, do a lot of rounding and multiplying, play with some variables on how the adopters of your paid tier will be power users and more likely to consume more resources...
At Bluesky they have a saying, "the organisation is the future adversary". Jay Graber has spoken at length about how BlueSky's core strategy is to build out atproto to the point where you don't have to rely on Bluesky for anything, not even for the core app. They aren't interested in lock-in.
You could well see atproto platforms based solely on video, think youtube on atproto, that offers paid accounts with even more features than the BS+ video features. 8K premium video for example. The sky (sic) is the limit. BS has designed AT Proto so that anyone can compete with them.
I have no doubt you are right to a point, and there would be a base paid tier that includes some core paid features. But Jay Graber does talk about a "marketplace" of add-ons. Suggesting you could build a modular suite of features.
...so an increase in adoption of the paid tier will increase your costs a little, so price in enough to cover that and carry the free tier, then curse a lot and go back and check your assumptions when the answer says it should cost the color purple and a pretty sunrise each month, start over...
My pre-launch calculation spreadsheet had so many formulas and inheritances and references in it that it could take up to a minute for everything to update when I changed one variable, heh. But people always think of the premium tier as "buy these features!" and it's not, really.
It's more "every premium user subsidizes X free users, and you get the features as thanks". (On our site it was 1:10 at launch; 16 years of inflation and cost changes, without price increases, means it's slipped a bunch. We have to finally inflation-adjust our prices in 2025, sigh.)
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