I am skeptical about this. People have been begging Dropbox to lower their prices for ages and they never did
Dropbox is providing different value to their users. Their value proposition is to store and share data that’s too large to conveniently send by other means so their average hosting cost per user is way higher than storing primarily text files. Better to compare to other note taking apps like Evernote ($8/mo) or Remember The Milk ($3/mo). All of those have also been struggling to make a viable business with the prices they were charging once they got past the initial buzz, RTM is way cheaper than it used to be.
Dropbox does have the money to conduct a market research. So I really don’t know if lowering the price would increase the total revenue.
I think you can get the information you need without spending money:
- Fraction of users paying for sync - Can get a rough estimate based on number of downloads, number of discord users, etc. Want to look at the trend in this fraction over time.
- Activation and deactivations for paid sync by account age - Want to look for signs of a cliff after say 6-18 months when people get past the initial excitement and decide the ongoing value isn’t worth the ongoing cost to them.
- Utilization for paid sync accounts - Can run a map reduce to get the histograms of file count and/or total storage size per account.
- Utilization for all users - Can run surveys in the discord to gauge how heavily people are using Obsidian and how many devices they use (yes there will be bias but its a first approximation). Comparing this to the paid sync utilization gives a feel for the untapped value in light and medium users who aren’t willing to pay for sync at the current price.
I really want to see Obsidian succeed but at the moment I feel you’re at risk of boxing the product in. Its very techie focused (which I love personally but it does limits the market). The overwhelming fraction of the target audience are multi-device so sync is a key feature but you’re losing people at both ends of the market - the super-power users who are going to build their own sync solution and also the light users who can’t justify the cost.
Yes, because google doesn’t make money by storing your data, it makes money by selling it to advertisers.
As someone who worked in privacy at Google I can categorically say Google does not sell drive data, ever.