Some people fall on the 'low margin, high volume' side of things, others on the 'high margin, low volume' side, and there's nothing wrong with either decision. With the former, you will lose customers who think 'wow, it must be cheap because it is bad' and the latter, you will lose customers who think 'I'm not paying that much to use hosted MonicaCRM'.
I personally would be willing to pay for and use the hosted version for $1-2 a month, but I am not price flexible all the way up to $9. $9/ month is 'real' money, while 1/2 a month is 'patreon / burner' money that one doesn't have to think about in one's monthly budget. For something that I need to use over the course of 6-months/year to see if there are relationship benefits to all of the data entry, that means the first month trial is not quite enough to evaluate if there is value there.
I heartily applaud the FOSS if you host it yourself version, that is a mark of a good person, there.
Instead of evaluation by comparison, why not evaluate it simply based on its merits and the value it provides you?
You've been abundantly clear in this thread that this SaaS product wouldn't provide you with good value for the money they want. That's totally cool, you're not the target market for them (at their chosen price point).
But other people do see value at that price.
So what does that tell us? Nothing!
Unless two things provide the same service, it's kind pointless to compare them because the relative value is tied to other subjective factors that aren't universally relevant.
MS Office 365 gives you 1TB of cloud storage and access to web and desktop versions of the world's most popular office productivity suite for $6.99 a month.
I don't find it unreasonable that the parent comment considers $9 / month for the value proposition of what is a relatively unique / untried / new (less than a decade old) software category (database for your interpersonal relationships) to be too high.
Until one has time to use the software and have it help you remind yourself what the guy you've only met 4 times in the past likes for lunch, you are paying 'more than an MS Office subscription' for access to the data you entered previously, and unless you quickly become a power user for the software, will use the Monica product for less time per week than MS office, at least in many office jobs.
EDIT: That value may be there once you have used the software, but someone is hardly being a cheapskate for not wanting to dole out $9 a month for something they don't yet see the full value prop of.
Edit Edit: Hippo CRM costs $1.50 a month , with a reduced albeit same ballpark functionality.
