Abstract
Mataroa is dirt cheap and will remain so. This is why. (no, this is not about inflation)
Introduction
Mataroa is considered to be low price. In addition to the free plan, which has most features, the premium plan costs $9 per year.
A blog hosting price that's actually reasonable! The trend of everything being $5-10/month is ridiculous, this is nice to see.
– Groxx
There could be an argument that whether some price is low is dependent on the value it provides (which can be different to different people), what market is addressed to, what does the competition charge, et al.
To answer all those: we provide some standard well-known (in essence) value, the market we speak to is largely undefined and potentially really big, and the competition charges 10x more what we charge, albeit with a heavier feature-set.
In any case, I think almost everyone can agree that mataroa is cheap.
Potentialities
I’m pretty sure mataroa can become a very profitable business. I think I might even be able to do it myself. But what I’m sure of is that I don’t want to.
I started building mataroa for myself. It’s almost like a work of art in the engineering discipline. I care that it can be an extremely reliable, high quality piece of software, that is around for the long term. That is its art. I aim that it’s useful too, even though art isn’t concerned about earthly matters.
Previously, on the internet
Another person I built mataroa for is my past self. When I was a high school student I really wanted to have a personal website. But, let alone the cost of the domain name ($10 per year), I couldn’t host it! That would be something around $5 per month. That was an amount of money that I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to spend. It would be for something that nobody would see. Not only was it a virtual nothing, but I’d also have to explain to my parents why I wanted to enter their credit card numbers on the dangerous internet. This wasn’t for something of obvious value.
But now mataroa exists and my high school self would see this minimalist design and love it. Maybe there is a high school kid in the world now, that would find it and like it!
Conclusion
If one had hired me to built mataroa, it would cost them low to mid five figures. But I’ve built it in my own time and the current upkeep cost is around €7 per month. This means I can afford to sell it as low as $9 per month—so I want to do exactly that.