How do you price your community?
I'm at a crossroads.
I have a community where I host online meetups for language learners
I can either charge by:
Plan duration - 1 month, 3 months, 1 year (all unlimited meetups)
Use - €12 per month for 8 meetups, €22 for unlimited # of meetups
I currently do #1.
Linguoda charge by quantity of lessons (they use teachers in each class)
Babbel charge by plan duration (they are just an app, no teachers)
I need a group leader for every session, so the more meetups I offer the more my costs go up.
But there is simplicity in option #1, which I like.
As always with communities, it feels like the normal SaaS rules don't exactly apply to us, but communities are also not service businesses. We're a category of our own, and there is not a huge amount of precedent to go off.
Has anyone had to go through pricing experimentation?
Your payment plan will affect the behaviour of your customers (just as government tax policy affects the behaviour of citizens).
Your second option is likely to limit usage to eight meetings because it has an enormous gap in it - the ninth meeting is extremely expensive (a marginal cost of €10) and users would need to do 15 meetings per month to get back to a marginal cost of €1.50 per meeting.
Simply charging €1.50 per additional meeting, however, would also likely limit usage (this is why YouTube went for a fixed monthly subscription fee rather than the per-view fee that creators wanted).
I suggest that your choice of plans is much wider than you presented in your question. There are many more ways to charge which you might discover (e.g your users might pay for some kind of status, privilege or feature).
"Your payment plan will affect the behaviour of your customers" - absolutely. i think I'm in danger of allowing the importance of that to paralyse me into not making the big decisions, as it requires fairly deliberate tactics. but deliberate decisions need to be made.
just charging by usage is leaving out different value adds I could be offering alright. there are other elements to the community that users enjoy apart from # of meetups that I have not been paying attention to. some status/privilege could be something, or introducing members to one another/helping them to develop relationships. I use discord, so I cannot build custom "features" on it myself, but organising it with permissions could allow me to offer "features" to the members. or building a web app to compliment the discord group.
Sorry, I missed the key line in your question, where you said that your marginal cost of having a group leader is your problem.
If your concern is removing risk for you pricing model, you could easily align your revenue to costs by selling meeting credits as bundles - €20 to buy 10 meeting credits, €30 to buy 20, or whatever works.
Or you could offer a low cost option without a group leader and upgrade people.
In particular, I want to encourage you to 'widen your frame' when making the decision (from the book 'Decisive' by Chip and Dan Heath on making better decisions). Your choice is not A or B, there are many more options available to you and they should be explored.
I'm happy to help you think it through, look at user behaviour, etc. if that helps.
I had never even thought of the credit option, that could work potentially, and would suit the types of meetups I do. thanks for the book recommendation, that looks very useful. I think I need to go off an map all this out and get it straight in my head, that feedback was great though!
I find tracking stuff a royal pain in the ass and most likely not worth the hassle of trying to keep track of.
The simpler the plan, the better, imho, and just throw in value as you grow it.
As it grows you can always look to create other products. Maybe a digital language product that you can sell to non-members. Or charge for sponsorship of some sort.
Ministry of Testing had events, membership and sponsorship deals. The events have pretty much gone atm, the online ones they are doing are (mostly) packaged up within the membership fee. Always good to aim for diversified income if you can...if we hadn't the business would've gone under.
tracking for use would definitely require more resources on my end, and probably I'd still have to rely on an honesty system a bit.
the simple plan is so much less stressful alright.
diversifying has not been on my radar now, but I'd say I do have the userbase and knowledge to offer something else to language learners.
thanks for your feedback!
@rosiesherry have you ever come to this crossroads in your community building experience?