I want to make a case for why I think their pricing is right 💸

RemNote
#21

Like really ? Sycophancy and sycophant are so very different ? Why the sarcasm, why the cynical approach to everything ? Mate this isn’t a really healthy way to make conversations or provide feedback.

Also our beloved devs, are quite young and aren’t battle(startup) worn. Startups are really difficult, to maintain, to hire, to bring in co founders, to gauge the user needs, to satisfy the user needs, to take tough calls (list never ends)

Why make it harder for devs whom we know are trying their best to provide to the community ?

4 Likes
#22

I’m not saying they should not ask for money. I’m not saying they don’t deserve paying, I already subscribed pro. I’m saying that maybe this is not the time (with the app in this stage of development with such a small base of users) to start the paywall, because it can stop the organic growing.

I want them to thrive, I’m not complaining about the money. Although six euros in my country is like 20 on theirs. But they are comprehensive, and adjust the price for students.

I also think clinics and people that are now students and will become medics will pay for using it :slight_smile:

I’m afraid that they won’t be getting enough subscriptions too make the project viable. That’s it. Sometimes we need to wait just a bit longer.

But this is just an opinion, just like yours.

Sometimes we need to risk and invest our time and money to collect and create something big.

2 Likes
#23

Now that’s constructive feedback, thanks !

But generally, considering how other apps work, RemNote has been in beta for more than a year and last I checked the users were in the thousands. This is both a long beta and a big beta testing user base, AFAIK.

Again, the problem with letting more people become beta users is that, it will be even more harder to put a paywall later on as more people = more opinions = more flaming.

But I really appreciate the way you explained :slight_smile:

1 Like
#24

This question might make others feel that you aren’t respecting their opinions (which I’m sure is not the case!).

Some of us just disagree with you. That’s it, really. No reason to be confused.

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#25

Fair enough ! I went over a line there :slight_smile: thanks for pointing it out ! I wish to apologise for that !
I never meant to disrespect anyone’s feeling or thoughts here, I just got a little rattled there and spoke out of line.

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#26

I really liked how you pointed out my mistake without poking or provoking me !
Respect !

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#27

Hence my separating the dream scenario from the workable scenario. Same response to the middle of your post. For scaling you need investors that will be attracted to a large userbase (which the current plan, I feel, is not likely to achieve), for open sourcing you may only rely on the kindness of strangers. Picking either is fine, trying to straddle isn’t.

Untrue, Image Occlusion being the most obvious example - it’s what Anki has thrived on, and what RemNote decided to paywall.

We should be openly discussing the arguments presented rather than trying to latch onto imperfect wording or any perceived status (to keep the post count to a readable number, if nothing else). I’ve not been harsh, and the point of being a mod is providing expertise that has been helpful in the past, not blindly toeing the party line (in this, I hope, all are agreed).

I honestly have no idea what sarcasm or cynicism there is in pointing out the flaws in the current plan and presenting alternative ones. It’s certainly not apocalyptic as it stands, but, in my opinion, it could benefit from moving to either extreme (open source and go it alone or chasing investors to afford a more robust free version while attracting richer clientele to paid features, more of which are coming). In no scenario are the developers likely to starve, nor any RemNote user go bankrupt. It is a question of optimisation, not catastrophising. Do you allow for the possibility of there being room for improvement, or am I again assaulting you in a most violent fashion (that was an example of sarcasm, just for a bit of fun)?

2 Likes
#28

Yeah, I think I mentioned that somewhere in discord as well, they could’ve put that feature alone into the free tier. I actually made a request to one of the founders already, maybe they could put it out for a vote, for integrating one more feature into the free tier. Users could then decide which is more important.

You were harsh while you termed it sycophancy, what I did and sarcastic when you said this :

I guess that isn’t sarcasm exactly, but something similar.

This is the first time I am able to receive your argument or opinion or clarification clearly. Whatever you changed, helped! I appreciate your little sarcasm at the end :wink:

1 Like
#29

Was there a big fuss over this anywhere? Forum and Twitter seemed pretty chill about it. Anyways, maybe that’s the way they reasoned the pricing plans:

  • A lot of people (myself included) wanted Aliases. How do you convert your current user base into a paid one? You give them something they really want and are willing to pay for instead of fiddling with workarounds: aliases (Yes, you can still have fake aliases as a free member, as long as you set a workaround up, just because of the nature of the program, but the true aliases promise to do to a better, faster job). I really want aliases, don’t get me wrong, [got lots of Independent Variable / IV (Variabila independenta / VI) :: in my notes to get annoyed by] but can live without for a while, is not the end of the world.

  • If aliases aren’t enough to sweeten the deal, the PDF features are there to entice you a bit more. If you are a student/learner/researcher or you get your homework/essays/dissertations done the smart way, PDF tools will come in handy. Both also help if you are someone that needs to give feedback on things and whatnot as well, aliases and PDF features can apply at large for office workers. [Even the queue (which I keep complaining about) can help content creators, writers and whatnot, even if they aren’t students, by providing them topic prompts.]

  • The 14 days trial is short enough to make people try out the tools and long enough to win them over (IF they play with the new features), without allowing people to just set everything they’ll ever need up, never to need the feature again. IMO, they should employ the same trial strategy whenever a few more paid tools are put in. It would be a nice, easy way to convert your members every once in a while.

  • They didn’t pull a Roam. I expected a launch in early January as soon as I saw them teasing Aliases and PDF features on Twitter. They aren’t charging 15 bucks a month. Granted, 6 bucks can be a lot and is more than Notion charged the large public. I’ll probably not be able to afford even the 6 bucks. Doesn’t mean I’m going to be mad at them.
  • I tried dozens of note-taking apps. Very few can do what RemNote can, even outside those 2 features. Do I get annoyed with it sometimes? YES, the amount of times I clicked a bullet instead of the first word on the line (not a keyboard shortcuts user) or had to fiddle with flashcards and multi-lines, or had to grapple with how-what-when regarding a feature, etc.,… but that doesn’t mean the program has less value.
    It stands to gain a lot of One Note and Notion users, and some of Roam’s users (less because there’s lots of…hype there).
  • Is it working perfectly for the large public? No. Can it still be polished? Yes.
    Still, the team put a lot of work in and released a bunch of improvements and features in a very short amount of time (and while stuff’s hiccuping, it seems pretty stable overall). 6 bucks won’t make them rich. Even if a human’s plan is to make money at some point (if only to recoup the hosting costs we inquired while beta-testing), they don’t seem like they’d do that by milking the userbase dry.
  • As for imagine occlusion or emoticons (usage: to signify limits, advantages, criticism, can be used to separate theories from definitions, etc), yeah, made sense to keep them free, but anyone can open up Paint or Canva and blank areas out. Outside of some of the PDF features and emojis, as free users, we still have a workaround we can choose to pursue. Or just fork over the money.
  • I don’t particularly enjoy knowledge tools being paid or online and I grew up in a country where everything (including food, rent, utilities) is expensive and unaffordable, but in which programs, games, music and movies are free because of piracy. Can’t bring myself to give them too much slack for RemNote’s pricing plans tho.
  • Obviously, there will be an outcry if they start focusing only on paid members from now on, but all’s quiet ATM. They also put in a “get one month free for referring a friend” and “get Pro for half the price” in as well. More ways to earn a paid plan would be nice tho, I guess. Would be happy to see more ways to support RemNote (users sharing on social media, helping people on forums, sharing CSS, plug-ins, making videos covering it) and getting access to paid tools for it, but that’s hard to implement and track and they still have back-end costs, even if we don’t include wages).
  • What RemNote needs ATM is marketing, lots of it. And not just to attract students, but also people that can find some other ways of using it (see examples above). There are going to be more free and paid features from what I read. The base program is unpolished but still noteworthy as it stands.
  • Now that the interface is less likely to gauge eyeballs more people will (re)try it and will start promoting it.
  • So far, all we can do is wait and see how they’ll handle things from now on. As far as investors and mods and stuff…well, that’s another discussion entirely. Also, there’s a chat we can have with them next week, I believe.

All in all, IMO, is not a perfect program, it still lacks polish, ease of use, features, and customisation, and maybe some features will be shuffled around the plans in time (even with some previously paid features going free at some point and new ones coming in to replace them) but it does note-taking better than Notion (inter-linked knowledge, no sausage of backlinks listed etc), better than One Note (what do you mean you want the old OneNote back?), better than Anki (notes are made into flashcards, you don’t need to host them elsewhere and rephase), better than Adobe PDF whatever-the-name-is and probably better than Roam. Those programs still have some advantages over RemNote in other areas (tables within tables in One-Note, knowledge managements in Notion, etc).
Something like TiddlyWiki which is an old open-source wiki/blog oddity (compared to other tools) and is not as out-of-the-box advanced, still exists today and has developers flocking to it. Maybe research into their model is required.

Right, this turned into a wall a text, my bad. Very little proof-reading was done.:sweat_smile:

7 Likes
#30

Haha, that could be a problem. I think I took longer than 2 weeks to play with and understand all of RemNotes features. And that was last year.

Maybe a theming/extension contest would also be fun? But I don’t know if we would have enough participants. That would be an idea for discussion on the community call on 13th.

Yes

3 Likes
#31

My humble opinion is that the pricing is for my demographic (Czech Republic) more than fair for what it offers. Even for students 6 USD is an equivalent of 1-2 coffees. Aside from the fact that there is always enough money for alcohol & tobacco, calculating in the cost of papers/notebooks and pens makes it totally worth it.

4 Likes
#32

Paying for syncing with Obsidian is not necessary. You can use a free version of Resilio sync to sync folders across devices. Roam is dangerous, who wants there notes hosted? Remote does offer a local only version with their desktop app.

I would vote for a different business model Offer an annual fee for buying that years’ new features. You get to keep those for life. You can pay the next year if you want to support further development and/or because you like the new features they are building. In that way, the developers have an incentive to listen to their users. $6 is a fair price. Agenda (agenda.com) has this business model as does Tinderbox (Eastgate.com). I would pay for $10 a month or a discounted $100 for annual charged at once. Point is, you always retain what you paid for, nothing will ever been taken away. Why is this more fair? Because in the year that you paid, you supported the development. At the same time you are not locked in. That is really a user-oriented as well as a developer oriented business model.

2 Likes
#33

In terms of stationary:

  • If you go to university, you can spend 2-3-4 pounds per semester/whole degree and you are set in terms of notes.
  • If you go to school below the university level, you will spend that amount per class, every semester, maybe multiple times a semester. But you need to be allowed electronics in class high school or below for something like RemNote and co. to save you money.

Lemme explain:

  • If you go to university, you can get by with 1 notebook for all courses (100 pages A4 goes by slowly), 2 pens on hand (plus 3-5 more at home), post-its/Bullet Journal, and a folder with some loose paper (for exercise hand-ins/HW/tests - don’t write lecture notes on loose-leaf, ever).
  • Some will need math or drawing tools and whatnot, but not everyone does, so not including the cost here. Cost of a bag, flashcards (you can just fold a page in half) etc. not included either.

Alternatives: Tablet/Phone with Pen + Laptop/PC or 2-in-1 Laptop. If the device survives years upon years, it may pay itself out, but depends. Useful and saves money if you don’t print out PDFs.

Depending on where you are in your school life, 6/4/15 bucks/pounds each month continuously is overpaying, at least for university. But that seems to be the pain of all knowledge tools nowadays, pen and paper are usually cheaper (especially short-term, but obviously you lose all the nice features RemNote Pro and co. have) as long as you aren’t picky and you don’t print stuff, or you aren’t someone that breathes notes half their life or something! :slight_smile:
Anything below university always required classroom notebook + homework notebook at the least (with the occasional allowance to use half of it for class and the other half for HW - you’d usually run out of space tho). We also had textbook + exercise book 1 & 2 & 3 to buy at times and there weren’t any free PDF for those. As long as you are allowed electronics in class (we weren’t), you are perhaps saving bucks at high school and lower level by using something like RemNote Pro, Notion when it was 4 bucks, etc.
Free: RemNote Free User, now-free Notion, Obsidian, online Microsoft Suite, Google Docs are another discussion.
Now, this is based on my own experience. Your mileage will perhaps vary. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#34

One important distinction that might not be so clear to some is the difference between pricing and pricing model.

I think people mostly agree that the price is not too high, for what you get (even those in countries where there is an unfavourable exchange rate - they don’t claim the price is high, just that it translates to a high price once converted).

I think the issue for most people (including me) is the lack of a pricing model that reflects their needs/situation.

–
For example, in my case, I don’t need cloud storage (I use local KB only), and I don’t have an “investor personality” (I think it’s risky to pay in advance for “a lifetime of features”). Which is why I suggest paying something like $X0 for current features. Then if later new features come along that interest me, I can purchase them (for smaller amounts). Maybe I’d eventually end up paying in total the current one-off price (minus cloud).

1 Like
#35

This sounds like a modular pricing model. I had suggested something similar while I filled that feedback form for pricing.

Essentially I thought instead of having a single pricing plan which would provide all the pro features, I suggested that there be different classes of pricing :

  1. Students - all pro features related to studying/SRS
  2. Knowledge workers - PKM + Cloud
  3. Creators - PKM + Zettelkasten

Now people could choose what they want :man_shrugging:t2: Also students version could be made cheapest.

Probably one premium plan that offers everything at a lower price than the combined total.

Does this sound like something that might be appealing to a lot of people ?

1 Like
#36

I don’t know about other people… But I guess the more options you give, the more likely it is for people to find one they are happy with.

I wouldn’t mind a very granular approach, allowing users to buy features individually, though that might be messy, or difficult to implement and manage (for the devs).

Maybe if they offered just a couple more plans (one of them being the one I described), that would be enough for the vast majority of users. (Then again, maybe they’ll find that the 3 plans they offer now is already enough for them - like I said, ultimately it’s their choice)

Regardless, I think it’s easier to focus on features, such as Cloud and SRS. Terms such as PKM or Zettelkasten are quite broad and subjective - it’s not so clear what set of features each would include.

#37

I simply used the framework that is explained in the website :

#38

Yes, I know.
And I simply pointed out that I don’t think some of these terms are very helpful.
Not a big deal though :slight_smile:

1 Like
#39

What all the fuss is about? 3 points:

  1. Pro version was inevitable for the sake of further development/improvement. So, no more why we have to pay and it should be free!
  2. Most of the folks here are Anki veterans and PKM enthusiastic community is in minority and it’s not going to change anytime soon. So, As a power user of Anki, we know there are only 3~4 essential features of the app we are ever gonna use and if it’s freely available, why would anyone pay? (Donation/philanthropy? In the future perhaps!)
  3. RemNote users are from all over the world so the only thing left for @RemNote Team is to price the product according to rational economy i.e., Purchasing Power Parity.
    That’s all!
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#40

Very practical and to the point.

1 Like