TalkTastic Insiders Icon

Discussing Pricing Models for TalkTastic: Community Input Needed

·
·

In ancipation of Yousif Astarabadi's forthcoming survey about paid tiers for Talktastic — I've been thinking about what kind of business model would sustain the product long-term. I'm also considering my various existing SaaS subscriptions and what I'm willing/able to pay for tools I value... so in the interest of proactivity, I thought I'd turn this back to the community: What are your thoughts about pricing for TalkTastic? What's the upper bound on how much you'd pay monthly to keep using Talktastic? Are there any must-have features that would cause you to pay any amount? I've been using Windsurf to vibe code lately and its updated pricing model more or less works for me. I get a base number of credits every month and if I go over, then I can buy more at a set rate. Similarly, I've been listening to more audiobooks and Spotify and for the first time ran out of hours (Pro subscribers get 10 hours/month). I went ahead of topped up and got another 10 hours that won't expire for a year. The challenge for TalkTastic is how it defines a "unit of work"... is it time-based? Token-based? Should there be speed or quality tiers? What would you like to see?

  • Avatar of Jesse Middleton
    Jesse Middleton
    ·
    ·

    A fantastic thread/question. In my world (and high level of usage) I’d go for an unlimited plan to not have to decide on how much it’s “worth” every time I hit F5. I use Talktastic 30-60 times per day at times. I recently started to wear a Limitless pendant and they have a free tier, a pro tier, and unlimited (for $40 per month). It doesn’t feel like too much to me if I make more money or save money by using it. Talktastic replaces a significant percentage of painful email, text, and Google doc writing for me so I’d probably put it in the same range.

  • Avatar of Messina
    Messina
    ·
    ·

    I totally agree in terms of using TalkTastic like a utility... i.e. one that I can use limitlessly, rather than worrying "should I waste some credits on this simple task?" each time.

  • Avatar of Jesse Middleton
    Jesse Middleton
    ·
    ·

    Who else has ideas on pricing? Looking to collaborate here.

  • Avatar of Yousif Astarabadi
    Yousif Astarabadi
    ·
    ·

    I would love to hear all your thoughts! I’ll be sending a survey this week as well

  • Avatar of Seth Blank
    Seth Blank
    ·
    ·

    As an exec at a company, I’d probably pay order $100/mo if not more, due to the time savings alone If I were paying for this as an individual, it would be hard to pay more than $40/mo and pricing would really depend on feature buckets and what I could and could not live without.

  • Avatar of Richard Howes
    Richard Howes
    ·
    ·

    The value of TT is great, when I can use it. One of the challenges is I work in an office with my wife and she is often in meetings when I can't us it. There are also a few precedents set, where $20 seems to be the price point of many AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor etc. And finally, I suspect $20 or $40 is not a lot for a US/EU citizen, but it's a high price elsewhere like here in South Africa. That opens up the question of regional/country parity pricing. There are two schools of thought on regional pricing. The first argues that development costs remain constant - if you're building in the US or EU, high development costs necessitate consistent pricing globally. With AI products like TalkTastic, it's especially complex due to ongoing LLM compute costs, particularly when using APIs like OpenAI's. The counterargument is that uniform pricing leaves money on the table. Without regional pricing, you miss the long tail of customers - someone in South Africa might pay $10 but not $20. If the subscription cost is lower than the $10 revenue, regional pricing makes business sense since the alternative is zero revenue from those markets. While I can personally afford US dollar-based pricing, many of my colleagues and contacts cannot. From my perspective, there's significant revenue potential being missed. As long as regional pricing maintains a profit margin, implementing it makes strategic sense to capture the long tail of the market. There are additional intangible benefits too - with several competing tools in the space, wider adoption through regional pricing can accelerate word-of-mouth growth and trial conversion rates. A larger user base, despite its complexities, carries inherent value as long as there is some profit margin.