

Ask HN: freemium services - are multiple subscription options better? - bandhunt

I'm creating a freemium subscription service and am wondering if I should have one "pro" account or break the "pro" service into smaller focused subscription services.<p>It's a site for musicians. The three "pro" services would be: extra space (photos and music), very detailed play stats, extra exposure/promo (featured spots etc).
These could easily be individual services or all lumped into one pro service.<p>Other examples:
wordpress - breaks down their site into several different services.
evernote - just has one premium service<p>Thoughts? Experiences? I haven't seen any good write-ups on this.<p>Thanks!!
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shiftb
Ideally you could create both, do some split testing and see which one
converts better.

From my experience (I work at a freemium startup) I recommend going with one
bundle plan. Fewer choices is usually easier otherwise they're worrying about
what they need. You can always add another plan, but it's more difficult to
take them away (Don't take candy from a baby!). Always try to minimize the
amount a user has to think and how much pain it is to upgrade. Also, less
important than how easy it is for your users, but important nonetheless: as a
developer it's also more difficult to support and maintain different
services/tiers

The key thing is less about what type of plan you're selling, but how well
you're converting your users. Make sure you're notifying them when they're
getting low on space, etc...

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bandhunt
Yeah, good advice. I always try to simplify things, so this makes sense. One
thought was that It may be easier to convert users if there are focused
cheaper plans that meet a specific need. Wonder if anyone has data on this?

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spencerfry
Have you launched yet? If not, I'd suggest just launching with a single paid
plan. Something low cost. Then you can add more plans as you grow. Without
analytics you won't know the best way to segment multiple paid plans.

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frossie
Hard to say without more details but:

If your service has a real professional end user (i.e. someone who will make a
living off your service), a multiple tier one seems a better fit. For example
look at smugmug - they have their free account, a couple of paid accounts
aimed at "serious" users, and a professional account aimed at people selling
photography.

Evernote has only one paid service but that matches their usage base - either
free/casual users, or people who have bought into the whole "second brain"
idea. But note that the evernote paid account is still reasonably priced.

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bandhunt
thanks. good point on the pro end user. I'm not looking so much for advice on
"tiers", but if I should split out the premium services into multiple premium
services.

eg: evernote could split their premium service into two services: \-
supersized uploads ($2.50/mo) \- advanced collaboration ($2.50/mo)

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frossie
Oh I see - you are talking about a la carte pricing. Interesting question - as
a user my gut reaction is I would be happy to pay $5 for 5 features, of which
I only use 3, so that way you get an extra couple of bucks out of me. But,
again the key thing is that $5 has to seem reasonable to me. If you were
charging $100 for 5 features and I only use 3, I would definitely want the
choice to only spend $60, or else I might decide not to spend any money at
all.

