Nicely written, @Shida! 
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Thanks for such a detailed explanation. This sort of transparency is what sets Dynalist apart - itās also another reason why some of us are happy to pay and support it 
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Thank you for this detailed insight!
I am paying for Dynalist since two years and for me the app is totally worth it.
Nevertheless, sometimes I wish the development could be faster. There are many features wished from users since years and it would be really awesome to see them implemented! I hope this is not received as rude, I see all the work and effort that goes into Dynalist and I really appreciate die transparency and interaction with the users.
Thanks for the reply Shida. I appreciate it. I understand this is a hard problem to tackle and I give you full credit for it.
I dont agree with a few things you said.
Yes I agree. But i feel its fair to say most of your users are not power users and dont use it for high value contracts and project.
This is very subjective and I dont think this can be generalized to all software products.
You should remember that dynalist is in a growth phase , it can easily be disrupted by new players in the market. Your price should reflect that phase you are in.
I completely disagree here. 50% off 50$ is not a small amount. You had this plan before 2017 and did you not get any subscribers then? I think you fail to see that you are alienating a segment of your audience here.
Finally if I were you here is what I would do. I would research the feature which I can offer to a middle segment and which doesnāt eat into my PRO segment. So eg offer 500mb monthly upload to a middle segment and charge them 49$. This way you address all the segments.
I hope you think about this and what you could offer to a wide variety of your audience. Thanks and keep up the good work. 
Thanks for the kind words! I totally understand where youāre coming from and we do wish things could be done quicker too.
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Thatās fair. And we donāt 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 theyāre using Dynalist for important work. Or their company reimburses it.
It is subjective, but itās a well known psychological phenomena and thereās 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, itās common to identify ācheapā software as lower quality.
Weāve actually been through that phase - From 2015-2017 weāve 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 havenāt 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.
Iām not sure if I havenāt been clear, but convincing double the number of users to pay a single dollar is more difficult. Iām 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.
Itās a matter of statistics. There just isnāt a lot of users who are in the position you describe - willing to pay but arenāt 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 weāll run sales like the Christmas sale. This satisfies most people in that category.
Weāve discussed this many times internally as well. Itās also a difficult decision for many reasons:
- What features/limitations would be on the lower tier, and what would stay on the higher tier? Iām not asking here, but I just want to illustrate the difficulty of the problem. Weāve spent countless hours thinking about what a lower priced tier could offer, and something like āoffer 500mb monthly upload to a middle segment and charge them 49$ā 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 canāt 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 theyāre less financially able.
Either way - We really appreciate that you wishes to help us!
I just wanted to express that weāve 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 weāre in a pretty good spot right now.
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I appreciate the reply and your thought process here. It seems you have done extensive research on this and have made the conclusion. A mark of a great startup is to constantly validate your assumptions.
You have a great product hear and I wish more people were aware of it. I wanted to subscribe to your product but not as this price and no company is paying it for me niether am I a power user.
I think I might give workflowy a chance and revist your product next year. Thanks. Keep up the great work
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Thanks! I just want to reassure you that people like you are not forgotten. Weāll likely be running sales in the next few months which brings Dynalist to more affordable levels. Keep an eye out 
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Hi, I just missed the xmas promotion - I think thatās a good price, well for me. I think you should charge what you think is right, lots of people will pay it. For some however itās a bit too much. I work for myself, I have quite a few things that I have to pay for on subscription, once you think $9.95 a month over different apps and platforms suddenly itās quite a lot to pay each year. Also, and I think a few others have posted on this, my country and currency both mean that $9.95 isnāt actually $9.95 itās about 1.6 or 1.7 times that, in what I feels like out of my pocket itās probably more like x2. In the end, if I work with the standard features itās ok, and then I donāt pay, but I think Dynalist is one of the best products Iāve come across and Iāve stuck with it for a while. I would like to be able to support itās development and not just be a freeloader 
So Iāll keep an eye out for the next promotion, but in the meantime if you ever think of any other pricing or subscription ideas then Iād encourage that too!
I donāt think there was any āChristmas promotionā this year. 
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 itās 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 negligibleā¦ 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. 
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What features/limitations would be on the lower tier, and what would stay on the higher tier? Iām not asking hereā¦
I know you werenāt asking, but I have thoughts on this! I think the bolded items should be part of a mid-tier package, offering essential āproā features, while the ones that arenāt in bold either expand on those by offering customization, or offer integration with third party products.
- Tag pane
- Unlimited bookmarks
- Image and file attachments
- Item finder
- Capture to inbox
- Priority support
- Google Calendar integration
- Daily Dropbox & Google Drive backup
- Recurring dates
- Version history
- Custom shortcuts
- Custom mobile toolbar
- Custom CSS
- Custom date display format
If you really donāt plan to offer a mid-tier option, I suggest at least extending the academic discount to teachers as well as students. I know many academics who would like to use it, but simply canāt afford it at the current rates.
Dynalist is worth every single penny, and I will continue to happily pay my subscription fee for this excellent product.
Yes, Iām a Dynalist fanboy. 
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Just to give you a different perspective, I find custom shortcuts and the custom mobile toolbar absolutely essential, while I donāt use image and file attachments at all.
So, it might be tricky to attempt to divide features into supposed āessential proā and ānon-essential proā. Opinions and needs may differ widely as to which is which.
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I would not use any of those 6, except Image Attachments. Maybe I should learn to do more tags and bookmarks, whatever. Backup, Custom Mobile and Custom Shortcuts are the valuable items to me. Custom CSS and recurring dates and Google Cal are great but optional.
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On the topic of pricing, I saw this todayā¦ From the Twitter of Roam Researchās cofounder:
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oh wow. I guess Roam is taking inspiration from Superhuman, which also charges $30/month.
$9.99 a month for Dynalist seems reasonable for me. cheaper than Netflix / Spotify etc
Not in this EU country. Both Netflix and Spotify monthly charges are lower here.
Hi all,
Thankyou @Stanley for raising this question, @Shida for your informative answers and everyone else for your contribution to our discussion.
Pricing is a complex issue and as a new Dynalist fan I am struggling with the price as well.
I have made a note to ask my employer if they will consider reimbursing me (thanks for that idea @Shida!).
I noticed the comment āSome users genuinely wishes that that by paying more,ā which reminded me of the many times I have made voluntary donations to free products because I wanted to show my support. I wondered if Dynalist had considered adding the option to simply donate and support the Dynalist team. Potentially as simple as adding a donate option to the pricing page.
If the above was substantially utilised by die hard fans this could be used to fuel additional product growth or even potentially discount the product for lower income users.
Is the above idea something Dynalist has considered @Shida?
Many thanks,
Michael
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Just chipping in here, I am definitely one of those that places huge value on Dynalist and would gladly pay double the current fee for continued development.
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I only subscribe at the current rate because DynaList is uniquely valuable to me. I could not afford to have multiple such apps on my subscription payroll. So if DynaList wasnāt the thing I use for absolutely everything notetaking, I would not pay the pro fee and they would get nothing of me.
In short, if more people are like me, I suspect they would get triple subscribers if they halved their rate.
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