OP should consider making a plugin for Shopify/Wix, etc. That would be more their target market anyway.
> I wouldn't pay more than $5/mo (or a $29 one time fee for something self-hosted)
And that's awesome for you, and the millions/billions of people like you. Likewise, I think Figma is expensive (but I'm not a designer!).
But the Internet is big! A new company doesn't need that many customers to do well. It's smart to choose customers who value more heavily the problem you're solving. That's why there's Shopify $360/year in perpetuity and Magento for $20k+ per year in perpetuity and self-hosted WooCommerce for no licensing fee. And they are all able to be successful. Customers that value your problem are also the type who will suggest valuable brand extensions in the future.
I got the impression that this product is marketed toward businesses. If that's the case, keep in mind that $15/mo or $25/mo or $45/mo are all psychologically in the same bucket as expenses go, for most businesses. Even most solo operators aren't price sensitive to $10/mo for a business tool they have decided they want. Choosing $15 instead of $45 could literally mean you're leaving 2/3 of the value on the table. That's value that could have gone into e.g. acquiring customers, which typically has some monetary cost. (Customer Acquisition Cost & Churn are two very real costs that people tend to ignore when modeling these businesses. $15/mo definitely covers the servers, but does it cover Churn?).
The point is to pick your niche and pricing and do it deliberately.
(Also, look at some pricing psychology as I think $15 is probably not optimal from that perspective either.)
ps -- I could write another few pages about how you get a better class of customers (more engaged, better feedback, more tolerant of bugs in a new app, lower churn, etc.) at higher price points, but that's another topic.
If OP is targeting solo operators (Effectively B2C), then I agree that the price seems exorbitant.
I see a lot of opportunity for this further upmarket though. I saw someone mention that this could be useful for agencies, and they do seem like an ideal customer. Funded startups seem like another ideal customer with more money in the bank.
I’d also reconsider the ability to publish a wall from the Free plan — you can get a hell of a lot of value out of this product with a single wall, and pay nothing in return.
Two alternate approaches could be:
1) Give away less value. Generate the wall for a proof of concept, but keep it in draft until payment hits.
2) Get something in return. Badge the free wall with a Shoutout link/logo/“what’s this?” that can be removed by paying.
Some initial feedback/suggestions:
1) Raise pricing, especially on the $15 plan.
2) The $50 plan looks like something agencies will pick up for their clients. So get ahead of that and charge more for that. Limit to N walls per domain or something. Then add agency plans that scale by # of domains where walls are posted. Agency plans probably should start at $99 (maybe for 3 domains) and go up.
3) Auto curation could be cool. Run tweets through some kind of sentiment analysis and email/Slack/SMS candidates to your customers. Let them Y/N each. That way they don't have to log into the app to get results.
Good luck!