If a web tool saves me and my team at work a bit of time for $5/month, yes, 100%, swipe the company card! Sure let’s buy another JS table library.
But if I’m working on a personal project, or I have to pay for said tool with my personal card, probably not. I’ll spend the time building my own solution from scratch while never actually finishing my project.
The last company we signed up to our service took 3 months and at least 4 hours of paperwork, I personally wanted to just tell them to go somewhere else but we kept getting emails from the dev team saying sorry
Just the licensing/subscription mess can be detraction if now your company have to tell your client that they need to pay for some 3rd party thing, even if your client have no problems with it it can take months if bureaucracy machine is slow
When I was working at Cisco, the general rule was to get manager approval and just go for it. Of course, these days, there are security concerns but for most cases, it's not a problem.
In a different company, it was sooo hard to get anything that they refused to buy JetBrains IntelliJ and forced us to use Eclipse. Most of us ended up buying it ourselves.
SourceHut, I don't use as much as I'd like, but the build and chat services keeps me paying. It's cheap, and I get a lot of enjoyment from using it.
I think if you do these types of services, then you really need to make sure that people feel good about using your service. I know that's a tricky and rather fluffy goal, but you either need to be REALLY good and then you can charge more than $5, or you can make people feel good and if the amount is low, it becomes an easy renewal next month/year.
If you're making a tool, fixed price for the current version, upgrade price for the next version, no subscription. I think we're at a point in time where your target audience would rather fork over $25 right now and then get a license, but would be hard press to give you $5 per month, even for a single month.
Make that stiff because doing what you love is doing what you love.
$5/mo
As a business, that is a terrible price. It is not enough money to provide good service and outsource all the things that should be outsourced. [1] Even worse good potential customers know this and bad potential customers don’t care if your business is unsustainable.
[1]: At five bucks a month you will need thousands of customers to cover one well-paid employee [2} focused on customer service, but acquiring, retaining, and servicing thousands of customers probably requires more than one full-time employee…
[2]: Of course if you are doing what you love, then being paid well might not matter. But unless you love solving billing problems, you will be doing some things you don’t love. But being well paid to do what you love is not bad.
That being said, also $5 is a terrible price. People who pay too much attention to people who post on web forums get gun shy and are afraid to discover what people are actually willing to pay for things.
Everyone who has ever raised their prices has said consistently that a) the number of people who left was below their expectations and b) the people who left were overwhelmingly their most complaining customers who caused the most support burden.
As I've grown older, I like to pay for things that make my life more efficient. Even if they are a subscription, and even if I feel like everything unfortunately has turned into a subscription and even if I feel like it should be cheaper. Hacking or finding workarounds to achieve the same thing for free is just not worth my time, and I value my time and boundaries more as I age.
These days AI will probably build most of the things you'd charge a tiny fee for. $5/month is kind of the rate of a battle pass for a MMO, not quite a "small tool".
$5 a month works for apps with huge user bases and they just take the small conversion and that makes their business run. And this is never web apps (certainly not new ones because the easy ones already exist).
If you charge $30-$100 a month you have to find 10 times less people which is way way easier for a small web dev. Yes the problem you solve will have to be more acute but a. There are actually loads of rich people out there - more than you think and b. You now basically only have to build for your most committed users.
See 1000 True Fans for better, fuller explanation: https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
Perhaps HN is not the best audience to ask this question. A mostly tech savvy audience is more likely to solve their personal needs with a quick script, etc.
From a business perspective, you need to frame your MVP in terms of what problem you are solving? How many people really do have that problem? Of those people how many are willing to pay for the solution?
Whether you use AI or not is largely irrelevant. The knowledge of a specific domain and the typical problems encountered therein are far more relevant.
The App Store model of small one-off payments works for this use-case. But no matter how useful a web tool is I don’t think I’d ever sign up for a small monthly fee for it. The ”mental overhead” of that is absolutely massive.
Sadly even one off payments for web tools are a poor UX since there is no central broker to take care of it. Next time I visit I (maybe a different browser etc) it’s a hassle.
I’d much rather just use a worse tool that is free. Because SaaS fatigue is real. Sorry hobbyists and startup dreamers I’m not paying money for your SaaS. Not because it’s not good enough but because it’s nearly impossible to be good enough to make me go through a subscription process. Even as an older person who can afford it and is used to paying for things, I’d much rather waste hours of my own time than pay a subscription. Importantly, I’d also much rather pay $100 once than $5/mo even if I don’t foresee using it for more than a year.
Make it an App Store app and you can easily get $10 from me though, is the sad reality of it.
The thing about monetization of software isn't about usefulness, its about marketing, which starts with realizing that the things that are trivial for you to do are way less trivial for others.
- Plex lifetime
- gmail workspace (was free lots of years, but not now) - domain(s)
- some Wordpress themes in the past for business clients
Nothing more, and I’d like to get out of workspace…
But internet is gigantic, just ship it.
I buy a few things for web dev side. I'm a sample of one but I avoid /mth pricing for most stuff if I can and prefer annual. Maybe me but the 'another monthly subscription' feels annoying as much as I respect I want this for my own business.
Will almost always start using free first then pay if its business beneficial to feature enrich of scale.
I think your best focusing on free and getting users. Once you hit a threshold you can ask for some $$ and some people will feel that's reasonable. If you start paid I suspect you'll have little chance of growth unless you come out with something truly amazing.
Obviously I would be better off trying to reduce my grocery costs instead (spend way more), but personal subscription translates in my brain to "I should be using this almost every day" and that is rarely the case for these tools. Exceptions are YNAB, Logseq, raindrop
If it doesn’t work, you’ve tried and now you know, and you probably built a bunch of skills you can use.
I had quite a few people who said “I’ve never bought anything ever but I love your app so much I’ve paid for it.” Incredibly gratifying.
Although check out Patio11’s advice on charging more. Customers who spend more give you less shit.
There are 2 billion internet users.
If you can sell a $5 subscription to just 40 000 of them (0.002%) [1], you can retire. There will always be someone who will be willing to pay for something. The problem is finding these 40000 people.
[1] 40000*5 - 30% various commissions - 50% tax = 14000 dollars a month, 168000 dollars a year unless I'm really bad at math :D
I'd have to be self-employed or have my employer pay for it if I needed a small web tool. It does fit more into the "need" category than "want", doesn't it? That is, IF you need it and that's a big IF.
Yeah I can fiddle with self hosting and finding the right OSS tools, but really, I just don't want to think about it. Its a small fee and I'll happily pay it.
can't it work by just sending them the app or letting them download and install it?
I have not used windows for a while, so don't know much about signing.
that tools site is by Peter(is) Krumins of the blog catonmat.net.
he also founded Browserling.
But I will go down the 3€/use road instead of the subscription one. I don't know if this is better, I just do what I would prefer as a customer.
at $60/mo without even asking a question about the product? yep, all the time.
Got any examples of small web tools that people are charging for?
Small web tools have some advantages that could make them sustainable as a business model. Off the top of my head, some of these are:
* Creators are way more reachable, they often get back to you directly when you send them feedback. Sometimes, even, you get to have longer conversations with them too.
* You have more impact on what the product evolves into. It's also likely that you get some minor features added if you ask for them.
* Smaller tools are able to resist against enshittification with less of an effort. Doesn't mean that it may not happen, of course.
If you're asking this because you want to create a small web tool, I'd say the best advice you could use is to make something you like, make it reliable, and be proactive in engaging with you clients / let them reach out easily, demonstrating that you can and will listen and care about their concerns.
And if you create something you're proud of and have value, feel more than welcome of posting it here!
Personally my gut says no. I personally don't use any tools in that range, but I also think that at first glance the numbers don't add up.
Firstly, people pay for value. You seem to feel your ideas are low value (hence the low price) which means you don't really expect users to use it a lot. And "very occasional use" doesn't motivate me to go to the effort of paying.
Since the absolute number is low, you're either expecting really tiny numbers or you're hoping for really high numbers. The tiny numbers result in tiny revenues and tiny profits, so what's the point?
High numbers of people are likely to consume all that revenue. If you got high numbers you'd like ho the ads based route, with maybe a premium "no ads" subscription. But then you can charge more (getting rid of ads is $20 value.)
But again people dont pay for occasional use. If the use is frequent then it's likely more valuable than 5$.
To answer your root question - people don't "subscribe" to single-use tools (if by single-use you mean one-time-use.)
Perhaps you need to charge more? (People pay $10 for a coffee and that's single use). Or charge per use?
competition is stiff though. but if you have a niche and you don't bet the farm on it i say why not?
Build them and find out! There's almost always room for something better, and if what you build is that, then some people will pay.
Unless the tools have large running costs, consider offering them for free (at least at first).
A few things are likely to happen:
Nobody cares enough to sign up – fine, zero users, zero costs.
People use it but don’t stick around – ask them what would make the tool more valuable.
People use it a lot – great, now you can charge for the value.
Two examples come to mind: spaced repetition app Mochi and markdown editor Typora. Mochi is $5 a month, I think. Typora was free and is now a $15 one-time purchase.
Both compete with free alternatives and still have many paying users.
$5 once, sure. $60 per year in perpetuity? Hard no.
Anyway, small tools like the one in question here generally benefit from being marked done and not changed further.