I don't like the pricing. $38 a month headline much smaller billed annually with the price more than doubling. This is the trick your customers strategy and hope for no chargebacks.
I understand your concern. We’ve had cases where short-term users abused our product for phishing, which led us to remove the monthly plan initially. To address that without locking out genuine users, we’ve added an option to extend the trial for up to 3 months before choosing a monthly or yearly plan. Feel free to message me if you’d like more time.
When I see a product — especially an early-stage product — trying to funnel me into a yearly subscription, the signal I get is that you think I’ll quit in less than a year which, in turn, implies that your product isn’t very good. It just makes me trust you less.
There's some truth to that. Early stage products often start out rough and part of the journey is finding early users who believe in the potential enough to stick around while we improve.
That said, in our case, the switch away from monthly plans wasn't just about churn. We actually got shut down by GoDaddy due to phishing abuse [1], which forced us to rethink our approach. We've since added a flexible trial extension to avoid punishing genuine users, but I’m open to feedback and willing to change if enough people feel strongly.
This is anecdotal but I often buy yearly plans on products that I've got a pretty good idea that I'll use, even if it's the first time I buy them. Though I'll freely admit it's always been the option of getting 1-2 months for "free" by signing up for the yearly plan. I've done it with various products, Proton, Disney+ (which saved them from my Danish boycot wrath to my daughter's delight) and so on. I've never even thought about it as a way of tricking me into buying the yearly plan, and now that I've thought a bit about it, I don't think your pricing would either. It's hard to say how I would've thought if I'd looked at the pricing page before reading these comments, but I genuinely don't believe I would've thought of it like that.
That being said, I would not base my pricing too much on a few random comments on HN. These responses can be a good indication, but I'd frankly reach out to some of my trial sign-ups who didn't transition into a paying client as well as some of my actual customers to get their view on it. I think pricing is going to be especially tricky in the AI space since it's so new and there is so much competition.
