Formula Bot · B2C · AI spreadsheet assistant
Charge for unlimited use and raise the price from $2.99 to $9
~5,000 paying users and ~$26K MRR; ~5% churn
Workedpricingpaywall
What they did
A few months after launch, relaunched with logins and a paywall: free limited use, pay for unlimited usage. Started at $2.99 during a race to the bottom with copycats, then raised to $6.99 and then $9.
What happened
About 5,000 of ~750K users pay; ~$26K MRR; about 5% churn, 10% of which is blamed on free ChatGPT.
- Stage
- early
This shipped together with other changes, so the result can't be credited to this alone.
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Formula Bot: Post your free tool in the niche subreddit with just a title and linkTop post of the day, then of the week, in r/excel
- Formula Bot: Repost your tool to r/InternetIsBeautiful after a commenter suggests it~10,000 upvotes and thousands of users; viral for months, but $5K API bill in days
- Formula Bot: Add a Stripe donation link to a free tool that went viralRecouped a few thousand dollars of a ~$5,000 API bill
- Formula Bot: Earn from free traffic with Google ads and a one-week sponsorSponsor ad drove lots of clicks; Google ads made a few bucks, not worth it
- Formula Bot: Do users' spreadsheet work for free on a call, in exchange for feedbackFounder says it turned a formula tool into a full data analysis product
- Formula Bot: Put the AI inside Excel and Sheets, with each user's language presetKept users against free ChatGPT early on; only ~10% of churn blamed on ChatGPT