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Like other many other apps, Odysee was built around a freemium model: free for the first year, and then $5/year thereafter. The founders had at one point estimated that they could keep the business sustainable if they reached 3 million users.

How hard would it be to get 3 million people to sign up for something at $5 a year? I imagine that at that point you might as well charge $5 a month or something, since the fixed cost of getting a person to pull out their credit card is so high

Might as well make it 20 or 50 per month. Or, scrap the idea of trying to get 3 million at 5/year (after a year's cliff, which is wishful thinking that your app will even be relevant in the market of next year). Instead, get 2500 at 500 in a slice of the market that's actually willing to pay for value (like enterprise). Cut your expenditures to a third by shedding the people who don't live and breathe this thing and you only need a thousand customers to be sustainable. That's within the ballpark of sanity. But no. Instead it's "freemium".

Honestly, these days when I hear "freemium" I mentally translate it to "aquihire resume with a lottery ticket". Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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