Secret Masterplan
The vision for Picobase is to make it easier for solo developers and small teams to compete with huge vc funded companies. This is already becoming more plausible with everyday thanks to AI, various "as a service" platforms and other modern tools. Picobase aims to speed this up even further by solving monetization and marketing.
Two types of apps
Developing apps can be incredibly fun and I maintain many open source projects myself such as Airdash, jsPDF-Autotable and Eventcal. A problem however is that to develop a serious app you need to
The Gamble
All sounds great on the developer side of things: deploy full-stack apps without cost and get paid based on usage. The real gamble of Picobase will be if users are willing to pay-per-use however. Is very cheap close enough to free? Generally it would likely not be.
The Problem with Subscriptions and Freemium
Many companies use subscriptions either with a freemium model or a free trial.
The Problem with Subscriptions
My favorite monetization strategy due to all the issues with the other ones. Unfortunatly it generally does not work as well however. Freemium and free trials has proven time and time again to produce higher conversions.
1. Optimizing pricing is expensive
Freemium means a significant amount of work needs to be put on experiments for optimizing paywalls, locking out features, changing pricing etc.
- Generally only a small fraction of users are paying which means that they not only have to pay for their own usage but also all people who use the app for free. They also have to pay for development and marketing of
The Problem with free and one-off purchases
Even if hosting can be cheap, cheap does not scale. Unless one-off purchases are required to unlock new versions etc one-off purchases does not scale.