[ohashi]

I am curious who the customers for this are? How come you need 250k if the price tag is pretty big at 500/month or 5k/month? Why do you need 250k?

If 250k for to last you 1 year (12 months) =~ 21k /month or 4 medium business accounts or 40 small biz accounts.

If there was some product adoption like you hint at, I can't see why you would be asking for such a small amount of money.

I feel like you're hiding something... "Everyone who knows about the product thinks it's absolutely amazing." and "I do have paying customers"... so where is the money? Is your pricing/business model flawed and you've had some people try it really cheap but not willing to pay those advertised prices?

Another issue I see is "Customers who can understand it love it." Why don't others understand it? Looking at your site it wasn't exactly clear what it does. Does your mother understand it? How about your grandmother? If you can explain it to them, your target customers shouldn't be a problem.

[jacksoncarter]

Great questions. Customers are individuals and small businesses who want a web application or to web enable their business. Most of the revenue is from building custom apps on top of it, then charging a monthly rate for hosting, essentially. I don't want to get too specific about the details. I feel uncomfortable enough as it is just talking about it publicly. That's part of the problem I suppose.

The pricing/business model very well could be flawed. I'm constantly refining pricing. Some customers think $8/mo is too expensive, others tell me I'm not charging enough, so I experiment with pricing. I'm not really sure what the best price is. If I lower the price, I do get more signups, but I read all the time about charge more and people will think it is worth more, so you'll get more customers, so I wonder if I should just make it $5/mo and get lots of customers, or $5,000 and sell harder. The issue at that price point is that customers want to be sure the platform will never die and the bus factor is low. The largest sale was to a Fortune 1000 for an enterprise license.

I have got plans asking for as much as $2M.

But you're right. It's not clear what it does. My family does understand it, to some extent. I do need a lot of help on the marketing side. Explaining it. Helping customers understand how to use it. That's what I mean when I say customers who can understand it. The market is split between developers and business users. I'm a developer and have tended to focus on that route, but developers want 100% control like they get with PHP or RoR. Business users need more assistance and quite frankly, building information systems is hard, so it takes a lot of time to help them figure out how to create a system -- with any tool. I spend a lot of time helping customers define a model for their systems. There is a large learning curve and I continue to shrink it. That's what I spend a lot of time on.

[Retric]

The other option is to have 5$:40$:300$ pricing based on a small list of new features.

PS: Once someone is happy with your product it's far easer to upsell them on new features even if the cost difference is crazy. Many people don't go I like new feature Y, is it worth the extra price. They go "I like Y and product X, is the product still worth it at the new price?" which is why people will pay far more for extras when buying a new car than they will for the same extras after they have the new car.