Ultimate Plan Upsell during Family Plan purchase

DMG

What does your feature entail? What is it for? How will it affect existing workflows or user experience?
The type of person motivated to buy the Family plan is likely to be serious enough about Kagi to also be interested in the Ultimate plan, at least for himself.

When someone is buying a Family plan, you could trigger an impulse buy that will give you additional income far into the future, each year that user continues to subscribe.

What are the exact ways that you see a user using your proposed feature? Please go into as much detail as possible, and provide examples of how other browsers/apps implement this feature, if applicable. If your feature suggestion adds on to an existing feature, how would it work into it to extend its usefulness?
I would not include it in your pricing tables. Keep them simple.

I would present it as a special offer, immediately after the initial $216 Family Plan purchase: Within 24hrs (or whatever timeframe) you can upgrade any of your six family slots to Ultimate for just $149 per slot per year.

I would guess that most Family plan purchasers would only be interested in Ultimate for themselves, knowing that the rest of their family will probably be fairly light users of Kagi. You will also, however, have instances of users upgrading all six slots. All this would be additional recurring revenue that you would otherwise not get.

You could also generate more overall revenue by discounting the upgrade of multiple slots, or maybe just having a discount for all six slots - perhaps a highly compelling price such as $499 for all six slots. I know that the compute costs per user don't leave much profit margin but, presumably, the other slots would get a lot less usage than the primary purchaser's slot. I'm guessing that most Family accounts don't even activate all six slots.

You could also extend the same offer to your 900 existing Family subscribers on Black Friday. It might even be an effective way to get existing individual subscribers to upgrade to Family.

carl

I'm not in favour of this idea. It's better to respect the user and their choice. Somebody who would even consider paying for a search engine in 2023 is a person who probably knows how to educate herself on the options available. An up-sell attempt could leave a bitter aftertaste.

Limited time offers have a very strong association with scams.

DMG

Hello carl

My proposal actually presumes that the customer is familiar enough with the product to know what the Ultimate plan entails. As there is currently no Ultimate equivalent of the Family plan, this is not a situation in which the customer has specifically decided against Ultimate.

As I said, anyone buying Family is likely to have considered and been tempted by Ultimate but ended up opting for the savings of the Family plan. Now, once they have purchased Family, you are giving them the additional option to also benefit from Ultimate. Once the customer has a Family plan, you are revealing an option that first requires them to have a Family plan. The timing is appropriate and it might be exactly what they wanted in the first place.

For upsells to leave a bitter aftertaste must require a very sensitive palette indeed. Practically every product is price-stratified because the needs, desires, and resources of every customer are different. Without Business Class most commercial flights would not be possible. The passengers who are somehow persuaded to pay more (despite all arriving at the same destination at the same time!) are directly subsidizing those in Economy. Sometimes that persuasion is applied to Economy passengers in the form of a last-minute offer to upgrade, and it all happens in service of the greater good of keeping that route and airline financially viable.

Your suggestion that an offer to upgrade will make them think Kagi is a scam contradicts your prior statement that every Kagi customer is educated on the options available. Consumers are aware that companies present additional options during the checkout process. It might be Applecare with your Airpods, botanicals with your gin, or fries with your Big Mac. This is how companies accomplish the daily miracle of remaining in business. No one is coerced and some customers welcome the option.

Vlad

DMG This is well thought out. As a first step we will add an Ultimate plan upgrade switch in the family management dashboard so that you can do this post purchase.

carl

DMG

Yes, I might have a very sensitive palette for up-sells and especially for limited time offers. It could be cultural differences. Mostly it is the "limited time offer" that bugs me, an up-sell isn't the end of the world. But limited time offers are strongly associated with scams, and could tarnish the reputation of Kagi for only a bit of short-term income.

Airlines in general have completely destroyed their reputations among the broad public, due to their dishonest ways of conducting business. Every customer hates dealing with them, but they usually have no other options. Kagi users have other options.

Many people come to Kagi because they're fed up with websites full of online sales tactics, that dominate search results from Google and others.

CrunchyFritos

carl I like this idea, but I agree with Carl that a temporary discount or special promotion could have the unintended side effect of cheapening the product. If this were to get implemented, I think it should be done transparently and not framed as a special promotion. For example, a bundle discount or a 1Y trial price for additional family members on ultimate makes sense and could be in the documentation on pricing.