I believe they are asking twice as much as they should be. Hear me out.
At $1/month/user, they would make $12/user/year. I would say most people have extended ~10-20 family members they communicate with, at $20 -$40/month on the lowest priced plan, that would be a fair expenditure that would fall on one family member, because trying to get everyone to chip in if usually unrealistic. Now outside of the USA it begins to get really expensive.
If they could offer it at $1/month, they would have significantly greater uptake. As for the bandwidth and hosting costs, are they not paying for that anyway through the default Matrix server?
I get they want to make money from businesses, but they are pricing out a lot of families who have Facebook-fatige.
I agree.
They're competing against free services. For many if not most family-and-friend groups there will only be one person knowledgeable about matrix and actively interested in using it (there might be more interested in using "something that's not Facebook", but matrix isn't the only option there). This needs to be priced low enough that one person can buy it without thinking and get their family and some friends on the thing. Maybe start at $40/year or $25/six months, up to 15 accounts.
Pay six months or a year to start so there's no subscription, then give an option to pay for another block or switch to monthly.
Also needs to include bring-your-own-domain (ie, let the customer point DNS at the service), because if you're interested in matrix and want to have your own homeserver then you know you also want to properly own the domain to avoid being locked into a particular hosting provider.
(All just my opinion, I have no relevant experience, etc etc)
At $1/month/user, they would make $12/user/year. I would say most people have extended ~10-20 family members they communicate with, at $20 -$40/month on the lowest priced plan, that would be a fair expenditure that would fall on one family member, because trying to get everyone to chip in if usually unrealistic. Now outside of the USA it begins to get really expensive.
If they could offer it at $1/month, they would have significantly greater uptake. As for the bandwidth and hosting costs, are they not paying for that anyway through the default Matrix server?
I get they want to make money from businesses, but they are pricing out a lot of families who have Facebook-fatige.