Yes, I get that. It just seems to me that the people who know what a "Personal CSM" is, don't want to self host and have 90 USD/year for a contact management and journal are rather small.
I assume they did some research, a/b testing etc. and found out that this is a price people are willing to pay. Also, this is 2 beers. 1 if you have to pay US service fees and a tip
The initial idea was for us to be able to work full time on it. Here was the rational.
I'm in Montreal, Alexis is in Paris. The cost of living in these cities is pretty high. We have families. So let's say we need to bring in $100 000 CAD per year.
9$ per month ~= 8$ after Stripe taxes. Then 35% off from the government. If I'm extra generous and lucky from the taxes, we get 5$ per subscription.
Then we need to substract the costs of hosting on a PAAS for 40 000 users. Let's say it's an extra $. So we have 4$ per subscription.
If we need to bring 200 000 $ CAD at least to live decently with our families, we would need 50 000 paying users. That is without the churn, right, which is pretty high currently at 8%.
7 years later: we don't even have 500 paying users
The dream of working full time on Monica is still there, but without VC money, I don't know how we could achieve this.
You may want to consider good old approach of trying to grow exponentially in a sustainable way. It seems that you have no pressure from VCs, you do have a user base and a runway.
You can try setting the thing up, so the costs are essentially static and do not depend on the number of users. This seem possible, since it doesn’t look like you store images or do anything heavy. You also do not need moderation, it seems.
It was a genuine questions from me.