As well as pondering a general price increase for Pagecord, I've been thinking lately about a offering a pay once "lifetime" option. I've heard that this is a popular option with Bear Blog customers, and it makes sense – no ongoing annual payments, it pays for itself in 5-6 years, and it's a show of commitment for the developer and the platform.
It works from a business point of view too – it advances revenue that you can invest in the product and infrastructure, as well as investing in attracting more customers (not that I've found a way to do this – ideas welcome!).
It's mainly about customer retention though, I think. I certainly don't need the upfront cash.
The one thing that bugs me is the name: Lifetime. Who's lifetime? Your lifetime? My lifetime? Pagecord's lifetime? Pretty sure the customer is thinking of this in terms of their lifetime.
I don't typically struggle with commitment, but committing to supporting Pagecord for the rest of my life sounds... troublesome. You'd feel the same, right? But why? Well:
- I was born in the 1970s. The end of my lifetime is very probably a lot nearer than the end of a typical customer's lifetime 😬
- I don't (yet) have a very clear succession plan for Pagecord for when I get too old, or too incapable, of running it. If profits were high enough (absolutely not yet!), I could pay someone to take over. Or maybe I could find a younger owner to sell it to. If profits are slender (as they currently are), I would have to find someone to hand it over to for free. Neither of these are straightforward, hence I don't have the plan yet. No rush, perhaps.
- Who knows what the hell will happen in the next 2 years, never mind the next 20! Unknown unknowns and all that.
I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to support Pagecord for years to come, but something still niggles me about committing my lifetime.
I asked my AI colleagues to give me a legal point of view, and they came up with this addition to the Terms of the service:
A "lifetime" subscription provides access to premium features for as long as the Service operates under the Operator's control. Lifetime subscriptions are non-transferable and non-refundable. If the Service is discontinued or sold, our obligation ends; we will provide at least 90 days notice and data export tools before any such change takes effect.
This is a get out of jail free card ("as long as the Service operates") as anyone with a critical eye would be able to see. It may put people off, I get that, but it certainly eases the pressure on a solo developer like me. If I introduce a lifetime option, it would have to be on terms like this, to which some people would argue, if so then why bother?
When you buy any product from a startup – or, at some level, any company – you're putting trust in that business that they'll figure out how to support it to the best of their abilities, for as long as possible. Sometimes until the end of the internet, which is fine if you have a 60-person business that makes tens of millions each year, but not so much for one-man bands. Oftentimes, even with larger companies, this doesn't work out because they go bust, get bought by Google and shuttered, etc. Given this, the promise of a lifetime of a SaaS seems to be on weak ground.
Nobody can predict the future!
A multi-year option is an alternative option – say a 5-year plan (I think Write.as does something like this occasionally). This feels something of a halfway house though. You still have a similar commitment issue.
So, y'know, I don't know. I actually put together a version of this which is ready to go, but the more I think about it, the more I think the current "pay a small amount once a year" is the simplest and most sensible option out there.