While I think this is a really cool product with incredible art assets, I just can't see myself paying $4 monthly (or $100 once) for a number of looping videos, a spotify playlist, customizable audio effects, and a few productivity tools, most of which could be stored in the user's browser, and most of which have better, free alternatives.
As a user I'd probably feel more comfortable handing over closer to $1/mo, but of course that's very subjective and this may be worth more/less to different people.
The art is really awesome though, but the amount I find myself actually looking away from my task at hand to enjoy it just isn't enough for it to be worth another subscription. I'm not sure what the big costs are for a site like this, but I imagine something like Cloudflare could kill video/asset delivery costs, having users connect their own music accounts (or just use Youtube for curation) could kill any music costs, but that's about it.
Hey! This is actually a website of mine, so I appreciate the feedback. About the price, any alternative or similar products' memberships cost around double (if not more) for often less features, so I'd say the pricing is actually quite low.
For the costs, I would say S3 for the assets is the biggest one, at least with the current 150-200,000 monthly users. The actual art as well is a cost since it's all original, but that can vary if say we don't add any new set for a month, which has happened only one time.
Thanks again for the feedback!
Hi there, paid lofi.co member here (I joined to try it out). First off thanks for making this site. I am super into Lofi, listen to it every single day, make my own playlists, have lofi merch, etc.
As much as I love lofi, I agree with the other comments that it's hard to compete with the abundant cheap/free content out there. I'm not saying this isn't higher production quality (it definitely is) or this doesn't pull it all together better (it does). I'm saying: it's not 10x better such that I would want to pay for it. I don't think $1 vs $4 makes much of a difference - it's the jump from free to paid that's the sticking point.
I want this to succeed and I think I am your exact target market, so I'm racking my brain trying to figure out what would make this worth it. In its current form it seems to only be providing enough value to be ad supported (hopefully your revenue proves me wrong?).
Stepping back: the overall purpose of lofi IMO is to be able to concentrate and work in a chill productive environment. Some crazy ideas of things I would definitely pay for:
- Maybe it's a monthly coffee subscription sent to your house and the coffee gets featured in the artwork
- Maybe you can set up group study sessions and listen together. There's been some great experiments of scheduling a focus time with another person and they are highly productive
- There's coffee shops in Japan where you can't leave until you finish your work. Maybe some kind of social commitment like that built into the site
- Commit Action is a cool service that helps you break down tasks. Maybe some human consultation like that
Hey there, thank you so much for supporting the platform and also providing valuable feedback. I definitely agree on the group study sessions, as a matter of fact there's a major feature that's been in the works for months heading in that direction. Hopefully it will be ready soon after summer.
The coffee idea seems pretty fun as well!
As for the price, I do agree on the jump between free and paid, but I also think that there's nothing actually similar to lofi.co around. The timer for one, even though it looks like a simple pomodoro timer, it's actually a lot more advanced than that and the only platform I know offering something slightly similar has only that as a product and charges double our monthly fee. Again it's hard to think of lowering the price when the competition is charging netflix-level monthly fees or other similar companies still higher fees for a fraction of the features.
May I ask what you mean with 'enough value to be ad supported'? I don't really like to share revenue online, but I can say the platform is profitable and has been growing steadily since launch.
By ad supported I just mean that if you aren’t creating enough value for enough people to pay, you may be able to get money from ads. But if the site is growing in revenue consistently that’s great!
Oh got it, I've actually never really considered ads because I feel like they could ruin the experience and the money they'd be making wouldn't really be worth it.
MRR has been growing in the 10%-30% range MoM since launch with a pretty high margin so can't complain about that, what I'd like to improve is the conversion rate though, as I feel it could be much better considering the high amount of traffic.
I wish there were in general on-demand payment alternatives with low friction. If I go to a real cafe I also do not have a monthly subscription there but pay for what I consume. Similarly, I do not want to pay monthly Netflix subscription but I could see myself paying from time to time to get access to a movie or series I am interested in (similar to video rental).
Ya its a bit pricey but really good execution. If there was an open source version of this where you could use ur own files but this was the player or something would be dope. Cant fault someone for trying to make some money though.
Yeah I wouldn't pay a recurrent fee for this at all. Though I'd pay 20 bucks once-off easily. Unless they had regular new content or something. Why does everything have to be a service?
As a user I'd probably feel more comfortable handing over closer to $1/mo, but of course that's very subjective and this may be worth more/less to different people.
The art is really awesome though, but the amount I find myself actually looking away from my task at hand to enjoy it just isn't enough for it to be worth another subscription. I'm not sure what the big costs are for a site like this, but I imagine something like Cloudflare could kill video/asset delivery costs, having users connect their own music accounts (or just use Youtube for curation) could kill any music costs, but that's about it.