Yesterday’s launch of the export tool spurred a lot of discussion about the price of Lean Designs. As a friend pointed out last night after reading through the Hacker News thread, the feedback was all over the place.

Make it cheaper! exclaimed a lot of folks. This is too cheap, make it more expensive! said others.

Arguments for making it more expensive include:

• Given how much time and money the export to HTML/CSS tool saves a developer, it’s worth much more than $19/month
• Establish the app as a premium product; lowering the price cheapens the perceived value
• You need to keep in mind your Customer Acquisition Cost : Lifetime Value ratio; lowering the price is going to make outbound advertising difficult

Arguments for making it less expensive include:

• Since many developers only need to design a site every few weeks or months, committing $19/month is asking a lot (that’s $228/year)
• There’s a price point somewhere around $15 where people start perceiving the price as expensive

As dpcan pointed out the answer depends on who I’m building this for:

Who is your customer? How many designs a month does your typical customer create? If it’s an independent designer / web developer, then they may create 2 websites a month for $2k – $4k per month per customer, and that’s only 2 designs. Then there are people who just slap up websites for $300 a piece, and may do 5 or 6. But who’s the customer?

Sure, you might say that if I’m making $2k to $4k per website, and do about 2 a month, then I should be able to “afford” $20 per month, but that’s really not the way a developer thinks.

Everyone wants $20 per month from us. It seems like everything is becoming a service.

I also don’t know if I’ll do a single website for ANYONE next month. BUT, I can sure tell you that I’ll do 10 before the year is up, so if I could just buy a 10 pack, that would make sense to me.

To answer that question: I am the customer. I am building this tool to solve my own pain point as a developer who struggles with design. And as someone who wouldn’t need to use it that often, $19/month is asking a lot.

There’s a strong argument to be made that I shouldn’t target people like myself. Hackers generally don’t like forking money over for a lot of stuff. But you know what, you have to start somewhere. Down the road as the product improves and you can build complete websites with it, creating additional, more expensive plans and increasing the scope of the audience might make sense (I’ll let existing users stick with whatever price they were paying if that happens). But for now, I’m going to try to keep it simple.

With that, here’s what’s new:

• A Lean Designs Pro subscription is now $9/month (down from $19)
• Existing customers have all been downgraded to the $9/month plan
• Trial users are now limited to 1 free design instead of 3 (anyone who already had an account still gets to create 3)

That last point is a big change too. Before, new users could sign up and create 3 designs for free. As others have pointed out, that’s way too generous.  You can get a feel for the app by creating 1 design; 3 is overkill. And now with the price reduced to $9/month, it makes even less sense to let new users create 3.

So thank you all for your feedback. I think this is a really good change (already had 1 sign up). If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, hopefully this helps you make up your mind :)