That’s fair. And we don’t expect to convince anyone using Dynalist for very simple things to consider paying for it, especially if they have the choice of a million other productivity tools for their simple use cases.
The thing is, only if a user find unique advantages of using Dynalist over every other competitor are they willing to pay for it.
This means that paying users are almost always power users, or they’re using Dynalist for important work. Or their company reimburses it.
It is subjective, but it’s a well known psychological phenomena and there’s no denying that it has some effect. Understandably it may not be the strongest indicator of quality but it has an effect on it nonetheless.
This is especially true for the Enterprise business customers (those who gets Dynalist Pro reimbursed by their employer), where companies are used to paying high prices for software, it’s common to identify “cheap” software as lower quality.
We’ve actually been through that phase - From 2015-2017 we’ve had the Early Bird discount for anyone who signed up before ~July 2017 which was 50% off the full price, which stacks with other discounts like our Christmas sales or referral credits.
Since the ending of the early bird discount, we haven’t seen a noticeable drop in new paying users, surprisingly. There was a dip in the months immediately following but the effect was very small overall.
I’m not sure if I haven’t been clear, but convincing double the number of users to pay a single dollar is more difficult. I’m sure there ARE users who are willing to pay after the price adjustment. In fact, many users do email us with the exact feedback you wrote in the first post.
It’s a matter of statistics. There just isn’t a lot of users who are in the position you describe - willing to pay but aren’t paying because of the price.
For those users, we have the student discount (if they happen to be students/professors/researchers), and from time to time we’ll run sales like the Christmas sale. This satisfies most people in that category.
We’ve discussed this many times internally as well. It’s also a difficult decision for many reasons:
- What features/limitations would be on the lower tier, and what would stay on the higher tier? I’m not asking here, but I just want to illustrate the difficulty of the problem. We’ve spent countless hours thinking about what a lower priced tier could offer, and something like “offer 500mb monthly upload to a middle segment and charge them 49$” is just too hasty of a decision.
- From a pure business standpoint, whether we benefit from this lower tier entirely depends on the balance between how many new users sign up for the lower tier (who were using Dynalist for free) vs how many current Pro users would downgrade to the lower tier. In this regard, we think that our discounts have done a great job for people who can’t afford to pay the full price, but still wishes to pay. Everyone gets the full Dynalist Pro experience, and not a crippled Dynalist Pro just because they’re less financially able.
Either way - We really appreciate that you wishes to help us!
I just wanted to express that we’ve been at this for a few years now, and pricing is something we spent a considerable amount of time on researching and experimenting.
I completely understand that it may not be as apparent when viewed from the outside, but our internal data suggests that we’re in a pretty good spot right now.
So I’ll keep an eye out for the next promotion, but in the meantime if you ever think of any other pricing or subscription ideas then I’d encourage that too!
I was keeping an eye on something like that, but there was nothing, as far as I know. So, a few days ago, I paid the full amount for the whole year. The developers definitely deserve that, but it’s also true that Dynalist is expensive. And as you say, Jonathan, if Dynalist was the only software subscription we had to pay, then $10 per month or $96 per year would be negligible… But those various software subscriptions can definitely pile up. In any case, Dynalist has turned out to be perhaps the crucial software for me to organize my life, so I would rather cancel all other subscriptions before cancelling Dynalist. 
