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by li_am 2317 days ago
This is a really great idea, I just feel the value proposition at $6/m or even the $3/m isn't justified to me.

That's putting you above my iCloud sub and barely below my Google sub, only a little below what I'm paying for Netflix.

I guess I'm just tiring from subscription fatigue.

Edit: Just want to add, unfortunately the few minutes of time I currently spend curating my email is worth far less than the cost. While it might appeal to a niche subset of SV users I just can't see the value proposition for anyone else.. I guess it's a question of your cost of service vs potential addressable market.

3 comments

Thanks! Yessss, we did think it could be difficult to sell a browser extension on subscription. The market possibly suffers from a similar fate as app store sales - people are very used to getting them for free!

That said we've had a few sales today, so we'll see how it goes. If it doesn't work out then it's fairly easy to tweak the price, or we could offer a freemium version.

Though my instinct tells me that if users wouldn't even pay $3/m for something then it probably hasn't got great product market fit and we need to change our approach!

I currently use and pay $11/year for pinboard. I am very happy with the service and I gladly renew every year. I am not much of a newsletter subscriber, but your plugin may help change my mind.

However, your service is not worth over three times the cost I am currently paying to keep track of my internet bookmarks.

But I also realize I am a bit of an outlier. I host my own music server rather than use Spotify. I run my own Nextcloud service rather than use Dropbox. I run my own Plex server rather than subscribe to Netflix. I cancelled my Amazon Prime after they raised the price. I didn't use their streaming services and I can wait another day or two for the junk I just bought.

Hopefully this info will help you and your company.

Spotify offers a lot more value per dollar than this.
There's an alternative approach that I think would feel more valuable and worth paying for.

Think about how Apple Pay solves this problem: they give a unique email address to every site. People who have their own domains, or who trust the base+suffix@domain approach and don't think sites will strip off the +suffix, do something similar manually.

You could provide a similar service for sites that don't accept Apple Pay.

Provide an automatic email address (no per-site setup required) for people who expect a few transactional mails ("here's your shipment tracking number"), track (across customers) whether those email addresses get sold to spam lists, flag companies that get caught selling email addresses.

If you're providing the insulating layer on email, you're providing more obvious value to your customers.

I actually use the service you described. It is called http://anonaddy.com .

I'm not affiliated to them (discovered them on Producthunt I think) but I use it all of the time for one-off eCommerce websites, newsletters, etc. you can have your own custom domain and anything before the @ is a wildcard and gets automatically created.

It is super easy to "delete" or stop the forwarding of email to these addresses

As a newsletter publisher, I really want to know my score. There may be some way to monetize my desire; e.g. how Return Path has their Sender Score.
Manual reporting functionality (modelled on the Sender Score one) is coming soon!
I agree on the pricing. How often do you need to subscribe to newsletters and how hard does it need to be to unsubscribe from them to make this worth $6/month “forever”?

Worst case:

* I subscribe using the “+” trick (john.doe+newslettername@domain.com) * The newsletter sucks but it doesn’t offer any way to unsubscribe * I make a new rule: all mail to john.doe+newslettername@domain.com goes to trash immediately

Agreed. I have too many questions about the offering to buy something like this outright.