Dropping the price by 60%
Metacast Premium is now $19.99
In this update
We’ve dropped the price of Metacast Premium by 60%. Here’s why.
New features in Metacast v1.10 and the story behind them
Metacast: Behind the Scenes podcast update
Podcast recommendations from the Metacast team
💰 Dropping the price of Premium by 60%
Earlier this year we launched the Metacast Premium subscription at the $49.99/year and $4.99/month price points. We also wrote up a case study about our thought process.
However, the world is not static. A few short months later, we are dropping the price by more than 50%!
The new price point
Starting today, the new price for Metacast Premium that includes access to transcripts for any podcast ever published, unlimited playlists, and eternal love from our team is $19.99/year or $1.99/month.
The best thing — the launch special for the iOS launch is still valid through the end of October 2024, so you can get Premium for the first year for only $9.99.
If you're a Premium subscriber, chances are you purchased the subscription for $24.99 (or $24.50 on Android) during our launch special. Your subscription will renew at the new $19.99/year price next year. If you have any concerns about the price change or want to get a refund for the difference, please contact us.
How we made the decision
In one of the recent Metacast team syncs, our Sr. Engineer Jennie said it out loud — "it's too expensive." Arnab and I had thought so too, but we didn't yet get to the boiling point. Jennie was the trigger for us to revisit the pricing.
There were a few factors that helped us make the call to drop the price.
Gut feel
A podcast app is not a critical or even a must-have app on the user's phone. Our gut feel told us that $50 is a bit too much for a non-critical consumer app.
I pay $35.99 for 1Password that is critical for my day-to-day functioning in life. I use it daily. But even so, every time I get a renewal notification, I feel like it could've been cheaper.
Market realities
There are free alternatives, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Music. The free experience may be crappy, but ultimately, how much is the extra convenience worth to the user?
Also, most of the other paid podcast apps are cheaper. We came across a subreddit of another indie app where people talked about pricing, what's cheap, what's expensive, etc. We realized that we're priced above people's willingness to pay considering the functionality we currently have. Metacast doesn't yet have enough premium features to command a premium price.
Decreasing costs
When we first got started in mid-2023, transcribing episodes was the biggest and most unpredictable cost. Over time, the cost went down by an order of magnitude. Additionally, now we know how much we spend on the user on average. The number is significantly lower than our estimates a year ago.
That gave us confidence that a lower price won't make us broke. As time goes on and Metacast grows, we will also start benefiting from economies of scale.
To protect ourselves even further, we have put caps on the monthly spend for all services that we use. In the "worst" case scenario, we'll have so much usage that we'll have an outage. It's a good problem to have, because reaching that level of spend would mean we have tons of paying users.
Hedging bets
$20/year feels a bit low. The biggest risk is that there's not a big enough market for building a sustainable business at this price point. We need ~60K paying users to reach $1M in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Initially, we had plans for ads in the free tier. However, the more we thought about it, the less we liked the idea. We decided to ditch ads (for now) in favor of a more affordable paid tier with a hypothesis that more users would convert to paid. We can always introduce ads if we must in order to survive.
At a later point, when the app is more mature, we can also re-introduce the higher price point for "Super Premium." We can do that when we understand what kind of features users are willing to pay a significant premium for.
Is this the right call?
We're a bootstrapped startup with no prior data. All we can rely on is a model full of assumptions. The hypothesis is that the lower price will attract more paying users, and it'll work out in the end.
Now that we've lowered the price, the "it's too expensive" objection is no longer valid. If people don't pay for Premium, it means we're doing something wrong.
Hopefully, the lower price will help us collect more data and build the right thing for the right user with the right willingness-to-pay.
If you've not installed Metacast yet, get it on the Apple App Store or Google Play.
If you enjoy the app, please spend a minute and give us a review on the app stores.
📱 New features in Metacast v1.10
New speed control
Someone asked us to support 4x playback speed in Metacast 🤯 We asked "why?" and got surprised (meta-point - always ask your users why they want something...)
We learned that people who have visual impairments can develop an unusually sharp listening skill and are able to consume content at very high speeds. This makes sense. They can't read, so they listen to podcasts/books at "reading speed."
It turned out some "regular" people also develop the skill of comprehending information at high speeds for efficiency. They want to get through massive amounts of content quickly. That's definitely not me, but the use case makes sense too!
You might also wonder who listens to podcasts on 0.5x?
Obviously, there are people with cognitive impairments who need to slow down audio.
But we also discovered that some people learn a new language by listening to podcasts in foreign languages. Slowing down the playback helps them comprehend the speech. FWIW, I often find myself needing to slow down Marc Andreessen when I listen him talk excitedly on the a16z podcast!
Up until now, we had a very rudimentary speed control. It was an embarrassing second-class hack just to get by through the first release. Now, the speed control is a first-class citizen that lets users adjust speed from 0.5x to 4x with 0.1x increments, sane defaults, snapping and a feel-good haptic feedback.
Get Metacast on the Apple App Store or Google Play.
“Un-chaosing” playlists
If you're in tech, you know that backlogs become HUGE and unmanageable. In our podcast app, we made it dead-simple for users to add episodes to a "listen later" backlog. The simplicity backfired and we had to fix it.
After a few months of using Metacast, our personal backlogs have grown to hundreds of episodes. The overhead of finding the next listen has become unbearable. The backlog has become unusable.
We have a search box inside the backlog, but it's only good if you know exactly what you want to search for. You must have intent. If you just want to listen to "something interesting," it's almost useless.
We went back to the first principles - how do people choose what to listen to?
In podcasts, a "show" is the ultimate criteria when choosing the next listen.
I may be in a mood for listening to Lex Fridman talk to a scientist, or a narrative-style, dense Founders podcast, or Joe Rogan chat about conspiracies with Peter Thiel.
To help our users un-chaos their backlogs, we made it simple to see the backlog grouped by shows in a "pivot table" view. If you use the app long enough, you'll have a bunch episodes you saved but never bothered to find in the huge backlog. Our new feature makes it really easy to discover those gems.
On a personal note, it also helped me see that I mostly listen to "podcast bros."
Get Metacast on the Apple App Store or Google Play.
🎙️ Podcast update
New episode
On the latest episode (#63), Arnab, Jennie and I chat about our decision to reduce the price. It’s a short & sweet 20 minute discussion followed by the typical recommendation of podcasts we’re listening to.
New podcast cover
We’ve made our podcast cover more similar to our website’s design with the fancy purple waveform behind our backs.
Follow Metacast: Behind the Scenes on whichever Metacast version you use to listen to podcasts 🙄 or any other podcast app and YouTube. Links are here.
🎙️ Podcast recommendations
Here’s what we’ve been listening to recently and recommend to others.
Jennie
Handsome — an awesome comedy show.
Ilya
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview (Acquired) — an amazing live interview that gives you a window into Zuck’s psyche.
Arnab
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America (Lex Fridman Podcast) — lost civilizations of the Mississippi basin.
🌯 That’s a wrap
If you’ve not downloaded Metacast yet, get it on Apple App Store or Google Play. Please give us a review, it means a ton and helps our distribution.
Also, for only $19.99/year or $1.99/month, you get access to transcripts for any podcast ever published that you can read, bookmark, search, and share as well as unlimited playlists and many more new features coming soon.