Hey, Shida here from Dynalist.
Figuring out how much to charge is a hard problem. There’s so many things to consider and so many variables at play. Here’s just some of things we’ve internally discussed to arrive at the current pricing:
- Users pay for the value they get out of the product.
Some people use Dynalist as a simple to-do list for groceries, while others use it to manage high value contracts and projects. While we do have plenty of users asking for discounts, we also have users who actually wish they could pay more because Dynalist is so essential to their work. Some users genuinely wishes that that by paying more, they could ensure the product will be continuously developed and maintained. - The price of a product affects the perception of its quality.
If a product charges significantly less than a competitor, then it is perceived to be in lower quality, even if it’s better. This is a well known psychological phenomena and unfortunately there’s not much we can do about it. - Lowering price is easy, raising price is hard.
I don’t think I need to go too deep into this one, but for us, it meant that we really should be careful not to charge too little. It would be almost impossible to raise the price in the small chance that we’ve under-priced the product. - Software companies are hugely impacted by economies of scale. A popular/general purpose software product can be priced much more cheaply than a niche product. This is why companies like Evernote, Wunderlist and Trello can afford to charge much less, while still making millions dollars in profits after paying their engineers.
To address your specific concerns:
There’s actually a healthy portion of our users paying, and a significant number of these are paying the full price.
This is the tricky part. Let’s say we slash our prices by 50% across the board. We’d need to attract 2x the amount of paying users to break even on revenue. This is not taking into account the added amount of priority support emails, the extra file upload hosting cost, etc.
From our observation, it’s quite unlikely for that to happen, mostly because it’s much much harder to convince a free user to type in their credit card number for a small payment than charging a higher price. Many users would never pay a single cent for the product because there are always other apps they can use for free.
And we’re ok with that. From day 1, Dynalist has given away more for free than our competitors like Workflowy. We didn’t want to make users feel like we’re squeezing dollars out of them to unlock some incapacitating limits. Our pro features are all very specific as to add some kind of value for the user, whether it’s convenience, customization, automated backups, etc.