Many just starting company's offer lifetime style memberships as an incentive for early adopters and than start pulling the rug out from those adopters as the years go by usually with gated features. This has gotten to the point where many, justifiably, view such offers skeptically.
Conceptually its obvious, such plans are not economically sustainable. They're useful initially and then are a net loss because unless you price them at decades of value upfront they're just a loss of sustainable revenue over the long term.
Very common approach, try before you buy, etc, etc. We're all familiar with these and they suck. First, you're busy, you have your own shit you need to do. There is no guarentee you'll have the time to thoroughly test out the product in the arbitrary window provided by the trial.
Generally highly restricted versions that just give you a taste of the application. Usually combined with trial periods so people can known exactly what they're missing from the fully fledge product and the sellers hope that is incentive enough to drive purchases/subscription.
Of the common practices we consider the free tiers to be the least offensive to the users. But we dont really care for the trial periods.
But what if there was another way... one that generated sustainable revenue but still offered early adopters and the organization as a while something of value? One that treated them with respect instead of just a source to extract revenue from?
Thankfully, since we're self bootstrapped, we can explore alternative ideas here. And we like win, win scenarios. Here we go!
First and foremost we plan on making our founder plan cost the same as our basic plan. but it'll have all the functionality of the most expensive plan. Including the usage based costs like storage.
This way your early adopters are given an ongoing incentive to keep their account active and benefit economically because their paying the lowest price for the best experience.
We also plan to offer a free tier on non-mobile devices. Mobile support being one of the incentives for users to subscribe.
Our favorite thing about the whole enshittification process for corporate products is the obviously self own companies make as they dive headlong into turning their own products to crap. Latest example the being 'AI ALL THE THINGS!' product teams are shoving down users throats.
As a result we decided we wanted to give our userbase an actual voice in product decisions. How we do this will evolve as the platform grows, initially we'll be starting with a signal group founders can join and talk directly to our team.
But Retrovibed how will you deal with the majority rule issues?!
We said we'd give them a real voice, not the only voice silly. The issue isnt majority rule. Thats a false idea from the get go. The issue is actually group biases. The real danger is that the sample group you're using to represent the total population does not actually represent your real population. Thankfully we know how to resolve that. Grow the population sample randomly!
We're planning to continuously (but entirely randomly) offer users access to the founders plan to maintain a 1% user base population w/ founders plans. This will help iron out bias' in the original group over time and maintain the population as churn occurs. And it means late comers will still have a chance to access founder benefits in the future.
One thing companies lose as they mature is the ability to rapidly iterate. Primarily because they've lost or can't hear the group that helped them become established in the first place. Early adopters are by definition people who are willing to deal with rough patches during design.
Retrovibed will have 3 groups involved in any (new/large) change in functionality. This process will not be used for maintenance work, that will be based on trust.
We're of the opinion that if any group pans an idea w/ > 70% of its population against. its probably an idea you should abandon or rework.
We hope you found these ideas intriguing and decide to join us on this journey. The main thing to note is that this post is just the high level overview of where we are going with how we're going to structure this non-profit. Its not the final word. Some details we'll learn on the way and decide as a community on the best approach to take.