Simon B. StøvringYesterday evening I threw together a landing page for a side project to my other side projects:
It’s a tiny and opinionated tool for sending push notifications. No sign up. No message history. No dashboard.
I like it. Would you? 😄
brrr’s onboarding flow is virtually nonexistent because I don’t think it needs to be any more complicated than this.
brrr is so simple. Its killer feature is everything that’s not there.
If I am to release brrr, then I’ll need to come up with a pricing strategy. Even if it’s a simple app, I’ll need to ensure that I cover my costs and ideally earn just a little. Choosing a strategy is difficult, though.
Current ideas include:
- First N pushes are free, then $X for 1,000 pushes.
- First month is free, then $X/year.
- One device is free. $X/year for multiple devices.
A tip jar and one-time purchase seem risky for an app with hosting costs.
Honestly, I'm leaning towards the first month being free and then charging something like $6.99/year. No monthly option. It’s a pricing model that’s as simple as the app, and a price point where I think most people who’d use it won’t mind too much. Or so I hope.
A colleague convinced me that I needed to add an additional feature to brrr. Tapping a notification should show it in the app to prevent accidental taps and missing the notification.
When people try to send pushes without an active subscription, I could just return an error, but I feel like I should also do something more fun.
Like, I could send a push saying people need to start a subscription or scramble the text in the notification.
But I fear that any such notification might be sufficient for some users to deduce why they would have otherwise received the notification 😄
Maybe I should take a page out of Festivitas’ book and have people name a fair price, but this time use it for a subscription instead of a one-time IAP 🤔
Do you want to help me test brrr? 👇
https://testflight.apple.com/join/55qZ7dRn
Learn more about the project on https://brrr.now
Harold Leewis@simonbs It looks awesome! Probably not possible or way to complicated, but it would be cool if you could run your own backend :)
@hsl That would indeed be cool! It’s a little more complicated because CloudKit is part of the backend stack and that's tied heavily to the app, so you can't own that part without also distributing another app.