Should less cost more? Is less worth paying for?.
So, we're working on a new product right now. Well, two actually. One is Writeboard and the other is… a secret (for now). But it's in development and will probably hit the street before Writeboard.
Anyhow,
we're thinking about how to price this new product. We know there's at
least one other product that is sorta like ours, and a few that are
distant cousins, but our product has some twists which makes it unique.
Plus, it's dead simple and insanely useful.
We know that the product closer to ours has about 10 times the
number of features ours will have, yet we are thinking of pricing ours
at almost twice the monthly rate of our competition. The competition
actually has a number of different pricing options and packages, but
we'll just have two: Free and Pay.
We think that there's a premium in simplicity (yeah, I know I said it was dead).
We believe people will pay more for something that has less because, in
essence, they are paying for just what they need instead of a bunch of
other stuff they don't. Plus, they're paying a premium for clarity —
less features means less clutter and that means a more efficient
experience and greater ease of use (in our case, at least). In general,
we think pricing should be based on value, not feature count.
What
do you think? Is less worth paying for? Have you found yourself happy
to pay more for less? I think the iPod is a great example of this — it
doesn't have an FM tuner, built in voice recording, blah blah. It just
does a few simple things really well and it's worth more because of
that [SIGNAL VS. NOISE]