When you get into the realm of $50 to $100+ a year, that starts getting into iffy territory, if not just for the numerical value scaring people. Unless operating costs are nearly high enough that it requires roughly $15 to $25 a year from a good chunk of people each (The rest or so as profit and re-investing) I don't really see why large 1 time payments from dedicated users and more use of ad space for free users wouldn't be enough. Countless other larger sites and utilities do the same. I understand the drive for profit and to cover operating costs, but it feels steep currently, especially in the coming global economy downtrend we'll be in soon with this pandemic. It'll be hard to justify that amount of money for anything other than what is necessary. If it were something like $25 a year, similar to Inkarnate's model, I'd be on board in a second, because $25 feels less like I'm losing a quarter of a work week and potential bill payment than $100 or $50 It's wishful thinking I know, but, this pricepoint does not sound great, especially since the subscription options sound more geared toward people who play publicly and look for random people to join their games often. If most of us are just looking to play with friends and by extension friends of friends, I don't see the added value for what you get for $100 a year. With Inkarnate ($25/year) Dungeon Painter Studio ($15 One-time), and creative use of limited resources on the free version of roll 20, you can get pretty nice games going. Until there's more features than API stuff, custom character sheets, dev server access, light visibility and character vault, I don't see the value in spending nearly that much, especially as someone who has played with paper and pen all up until this point who, essentially has all the aformentioned features covered through other means, save for light visibility emulation, which, paper doesn't have either. Lets see: -API stuff is nice, but ultimately it isn't necessary unless you really, really, really can't muster clicking a down arrow on the UI to subtract from a number on your sheet when it comes to ammunition and other similarly tracked resources, and other things that you can easily take care of by simply typing a few characters. -Custom character sheets: Pen and paper or apps for $5 do this nicely, don't see much of a value in paying for it on it's own. -Dev server access: You are paying them to beta test things for them. There isn't much wrong with it in practice because you do get early access to things, but I personally dislike that model. Something that is typically work or an employee of a company being monetized and paid for by the consumer and the company getting free labor for it with a profit on top of that just doesn't sit right with me personally. -Light visibility emulation: While sort of nice, you can do that simply by using the ruler and knowing whether you have darkvision/devilsight etc.. or the dm could just not reveal things if not seen. -Character vault: Pay $50-$100 to drag and drop characters from one game to another? Or just take 10-15 minutes, probably during a session 0 where no gameplay is going to happen anyway or in the time before a game starts, copying values from one and putting them into another sheet? I feel the latter isn't much trouble. Not enough to entice me to pay $50 to $100 dollars for the convenience. And I get the appeal is moreso for dedicated DM's but, if you have so many specific NPCs that have character sheets, you may be planning a little too rigidly for campaigns in a game notorious for plans never panning out exactly the way you expect them to, nor one where details remain set in stone very often after writing up an adventure. To justify the cost to veterans of Pen and Paper, there's got to be more offered or a reduction in price of some magnitude. It's nice that you get more space for tokens, maps and stuff, but at the end of the day, they're marketing to a demographic that thrives on using our imagination to fill in 90% of gaps in the game, which is is a hard sell on it's own, and charging above $50 for a year isn't doing it many favors in my opinion. But to return to the topic at hand and with what I've described, I could see shelling out $115 to $130 for lifetime access to it's currently offered features, if only for the convenience factor, and I feel like it would be much less of a hard sell if it were cheaper on the monthly basis. Take a play out of the Mobile Games Industry's playbook. Smaller amounts on the surface typically lead to longer retained customers and more spending in the long run. The less you have to make your consumer question whether or not it's a good investment, the more likely to attract them and subsequently keep them paying into it. It should be low on peoples' "Do I remove this from my budget?" list.
