(I see previous threads about a sort of pro rata pricing scheme, but not quite this way. I already emailed Vlad because I'm apparently a boomer on the inside, so I locked on to the email addresses and totally failed to notice the feature requests forum. So I'll post here as well in case it proves useful to gauge general interest in this.)
Have you considered simply taking "deposits" (a la nearlyfreespeech.net) and charging $0.00833 per search / AI interaction (2 * 300 * $0.00833 = $4.998)?
Or $0.0075 each (2 * 3600 * 0.0075 = $54), if the user deposits the equivalent of the annual price and waives the right to request a withdrawal/refund, so you know you can use it now instead of reserving it until usage occurs.
Or just say no backsies entirely, and price along a gradient scaled to the current proportion between monthly and annual pricing, but extending beyond, such that users willing to deposit bulk amounts can enjoy bulk pricing.
(While writing this part, I managed to forget that there is an unlimited plan, so maybe this doesn't quite scale like that, but there could still be interest from people who don't want to have to pay a monthly/yearly "retainer" for periodic or sporadic burst usage.)
Higher-tier features could be similarly pro-rated.
Even if you have to add markup to account for the revenue currently brought in from monthly users who don't use their entire quota, I bet there's still a win-win to be had. You could incentivize prospects who are uncertain about the value proposition of the monthly starter plan owing to limited or sporadic usage. There's also a 300-search/300-interaction gap between starter and pro where some people might land (5/0.00833 =~ 600; i.e., the price of the monthly pro plan accommodates 600 searches + 600 interactions at the pro rata price of the monthly starter plan).
I am, of course, aware that my radical ideas about search engine pricing reform may have already occurred to others, particularly the ones actually running paid search engines, so despite how awesome I think this idea is, I remain open to the possibility of it being infeasible.
- User deposits arbitrary amount, with minimum dictated by payment processor overhead, etc.
- The account is credited with an amount of actions that can be invoked as either searches or AI interactions, the price per action being scaled to the deposit amount.
- ????
- Profit?
