We've been building the freemium website for a few years. We launched paid plans in Feb ($19/m for additional features and higher limits), which grew slowly over the last 6 months, but not to a point where they were covering costs, or likely to any time soon.
The site is popular though - we get about half a million pageviews a month, and have about 7k subscribers to a daily newsletter, and growing every month. We just weren't getting Pro signups - the value prop wasn't there.
We could have put more of the free features behind the paywall, but the industry is getting ultra-competitive, with all our competitors reducing their subscription prices. So with the trajectory of "the value of the data is going to zero" together with "the best way to help everyday investors is to give everyone access to the same information", we decided to change business model and switch to ads/sponsorship (to be implemented soon), which estimates seem to suggest will allow us to much more easily cover our monthly costs.
The site is popular though - we get about half a million pageviews a month, and have about 7k subscribers to a daily newsletter, and growing every month. We just weren't getting Pro signups - the value prop wasn't there.
We could have put more of the free features behind the paywall, but the industry is getting ultra-competitive, with all our competitors reducing their subscription prices. So with the trajectory of "the value of the data is going to zero" together with "the best way to help everyday investors is to give everyone access to the same information", we decided to change business model and switch to ads/sponsorship (to be implemented soon), which estimates seem to suggest will allow us to much more easily cover our monthly costs.
Any feedback/comments/etc, please let me know!