Monetization/Business Model Suggestion

#1

mealime team,

I say the following because I love your app and think it has so much potential. However, I’ve seen in some comments below that you guys have a small team to work on new features and such. Obviously you know more about your financial situation than me, but I do know that more money solves a lot of issues.

My hunch is that your current model of free/optional premium is not optimal, for various reasons:

  1. As a customer, I don’t see that the difference between free/premium is large enough to justify paying. Its very easy to get by without paying.
  2. I think the price is too high, especially considering that minor difference between the two. $3/mo would be much more palatable, but obviously you have probably done more research on that price point than me.

I would suggest maybe making a $5-10 fee for download, and then maybe a flat fee for new batches of recipes or as you have now with the subscription.

Alternatively, you could offer a free trial for full utilization of all features, and then require users begin paying after a month or two. Similar to spotify, without the ads.

There’s many other idea/routes you could take, but I just wanted to let you hear my voice as a user that I wouldn’t think the current model is the best.

#2

Hi @Acherone. Thanks so much for taking the time to share your suggestions on how to make Mealime better! What holds us back, more than money, is that we care so much about making sure everything we do is of really high quality, and refuse to rush out half-baked solutions. From experience, we believe that it isn’t easier to build an amazing product by throwing more money at the problem. That being said, we are doing well-enough financially that we are starting to expand our team, slowly and carefully, and investing lots of love back in to the product!

There are pros and cons to our current business model. One of the big pros is that we can help many more people eat healthily and save time, by allowing them to use app for free if they can’t afford to pay for it!

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