Apple, of course, is one of the most successful versions of this. The company currently has 585m total paid subscribers for its various services, allowing it to earn revenue over the usage cycle rather than from purchase to purchase.

The à la carte model fits well in many industries. Harvard Business Review Press sells individual book chapters and individual articles from Harvard Business Review (HBR) at a price of $6.95 each. Other publishing companies have adopted a similar model. This is a very attractive model for those customers with an intensive interest in one topic or a

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The reason I find this company so interesting is it doesn’t seem like a venture-backable business at first glance. In order to get $100M in revenue, they would have to have $1.0B in gross subscription volume. When they went through YC, they had an average revenue / subscriber of $70. If that stays the same, Substack will need about 14.3M paid subsc... See more

We’ve observed a trend of consumer apps pushing annual discounted pricing more and more aggressively (sometimes not even offering monthly prices anymore, like Calm) to improve revenue retention metrics and reinvest revenues into growth. We’ve also seen others do a lot of creative experimentation with their price points (e.g. Noom’s ‘name your own p... See more