This is interesting. Does it come from the past experience with another product?
I have SaaS, and cheap monthly plans definitely create problems: higher infrastructure costs to host them, and lots of support tickets (why people who pay less tend to have lots of questions?). However, they pay money so it’s sort of OK. I probably should think of allowing only 6 or 12 month payments for cheap plans and see how it goes.
Yes. My experience with desktop software https://www.perfecttableplan.com/ is also that customers who pay the least often make the most support requests.
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I’ve had this, people happy to pay $19/mth, but only if I spend 30 hours to build a new feature for them.
And even after you build that feature they still need to “think more” and disappear 
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A mistake I’ve made perhaps twice… I learnt the hard way to ignore comments like “if you add this thing then I’ll buy your software and so will five of my buddies”
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People liek this are often all talk.
I usually tell people they should base their purchasing decision on what the software does now.
If I think something is a good idea or if lots of people ask for it, I might implement it. But not just to get 1 or 2 sales.
FYI I just released v1.1.0 and this includes a Javascript transform type. So you can now write your own custom transforms in Javascript.
Currently I am not exposing any application objects to the Javascript engine. But you can use standard Javascript functions for maths, date etc. Javascript is one of my least favourite languages, but this new feature does add a lot of flexibility. It is also surprisingly fast (simple Javscript transform to multiply 2 columns took 0.03 seconds on a 100k row dataset).
BTW I got quite a lot of resistance to a yearly sub. So I switched back to the trusted one-time fee (+paid major upgrades). I may try to reintroduce subscriptions further down the line.
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It’s great to hear your experience @Andy
So I wonder whether there is any evidence that doing both is a bad practice? Starting the customer on a lower one time price and then encouraging a subscription for a subset of features; or somehow implementing something similar to the “free to play with in-app purchase” model which is popular in the games industry!?
Here is an idea, let customers buy the basic product at a one time fixed price or even free and give them a number of “credit points”. Then assign credit points to different “paid” functionalities and reduce customer’s credit points each time they use a paid function.
Just like how mobile network operators work, after a while you can show the more frequent users that they are just better off with a subscription that ends up cheaper for them.
Sounds complicated. And hard to enforce with desktop software, where you might not always have an Internet connection. I am trying hard to keep everything simple, both for my sake and for the customers’ sake. Also in line with the ‘Easy’ positioning.
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