

Ask HN: Subscription or Micropayments - newMediaOutlet

New HN account as I don't want to risk competitors tracking my asking this question.<p>I run a mildly successful niche website with a strong audience, for which the plan has always been to proceed from ad based content to subscription based.<p>Originally I had planned to go micropayments because of the competitors in the niche who follow a subscription model, they use straight up subscription. I thought micropayments would differentiate me and be a welcome option.<p>The more research and reading I do I am coming to feel that micropayments would be worse and that I should simply follow a subscription model.<p>Does anyone have input? Are there any compelling reasons to go micropayments?
======
notahacker
Depends on typical user profile and the rates you're looking to charge - some
micropayments are so low they're barely worth collecting the payment
processing fees.

How do users obtain value from the service? Is it something where there's a
quantifiable marginal benefit from each part of the content accessed (like a
set of tutorials, or product/market/region specific data) or is it something
more intangible (e.g. niche news, multimedia or a discussion platform) where
customers might tend to underestimate the value of accessing that little bit
more around their immediate area of interest. Can they even gauge whether
specific bits of the service are worth money to them, or is the choice to
subscribe to everything (possibly with a limited trial first) actually easier?

Is this the same for all users? Are user groups differentiated (i.e. discrete
group that would only contemplate subscribing or making one-off micropayments)
or overlapping (i.e. most would be happy with either payment option, and would
go with the cheapest to them given a choice). If it's the former, is it
possible to offer both payment options? If not, maybe it's feasible to segment
parts of the service as chargeable extras. Is the value to the end user fairly
uniform or are some likely to derive so much benefit from occasional use of
one small part of the site that they'd happily pay subscription costs at the
same rate as people using most of your content?

As a general rule smaller numbers of people make more use of resources made
available on a subscription basis whilst larger numbers of people make
substantially less use of resources billed individually. Which is easier to
budget for will depend on your customer acquisition and support costs (vary by
user) vs bandwidth costs (vary by usage)

------
imcqueen
I would say the attractiveness of micropayments is it's less of a commitment,
but subscriptions are generally better for both sides if what you are
providing is valuable to your users.

As long as a subscription doesn't make it super difficult to cancel and
notifies me when they're billing me I am usually fine with it.

~~~
bigsassy
_but subscriptions are generally better for both sides if what you are
providing is valuable to your users._

How so? And what experience do you have with charging micropayments and
subscriptions?

In case it needs to be said, this is not me trying to call you out but me
trying to get some juicy information out of you :)

------
noodle
why not both? single serving things as appropriate via micropayments, or
unlimited via sub.

