Pricing questions you might have…
How do I know how much it costs per month?
Having a fixed + variable model might seem a bit odd, but you’ll see that - unless you’re using a huge amount of space -, tagaway is cheaper than many subscription services. Also, you’ll always have control to limit the amount of space you use and the amount you pay monthly. Control is always on your side.
If you’d like to calculate how much it would be a month, here’s a calculator to help you with that.
Monthly fee calculator
| I’m in the EU | I’m outside the EU |
| Amount of gigabytes I’m using | |
| My free gigabytes 5 | |
| My total monthly fee €XX.XX | |
I still think tagaway is quite pricey…
Our pricing has two objectives:
- Be able to pay for the team and ensure the future of the company.
- Be as low as possible, without compromising the viability of the company.
If we ensure the future and viability of the company, then we can make sure that:
- Our company - and the product - will continue to exist.
- We won’t need to bring outside capital. If we bring outside capital, then the company’s control could be compromised. That could directly clash with our principle of passing as much value to users by not maximizing revenue, never selling the company, working in the open and charging as low as possible.
- We won’t need to monetize our user’s data in indirect ways - namely, by using their data for other purposes unrelated to the product.
As we grow, we will experience economies of scale and our product will become cheaper. We plan on lowering our prices as that happens, rather than increasing our profits.
Note how this is the exact opposite of what most online services do: start with artificially low prices funded by VC capital, get as many users as possible, and then raise prices, sell user data, sell the company, or go bankrupt (or all of the above).
Wouldn’t it be easier to charge a flat fee like everybody else?
If we'd charge a flat fee - users pay a fixed monthly fee and they get a certain amount of GB -, we would benefit from users using the least amount of storage possible. More storage is more cost, hence less profit. We would charge a reasonable-but-a-little-high monthly fee and give users a huge amount of storage at their disposal. This creates an illusion of abundance. Users believe that they have a lot of space available - which is good for them-, but really don't use that much space - which is good for the company's profit. If all users used all the storage space at their disposal, then the company would have to raise prices.
There's also another downside to the flat-fee model: users who use little space are de-facto subsidizing those who use more space. Ideally, no user should have to pay for the cost of another user.
This is called the ‘flat-rate bias’.
How did you get to this pricing model?
This is a fully transparent model. Our users have clarity on how we price the product, they can control how much they spend and it's clear on where their money is going. A flat-fee model would put our incentives in opposition to our users, so we chose a model where we profit from a fixed fee and our users get the space at a cost value.
If you want full details on how this pricing works and why, here’s how we calculated the price of tagaway.
Why different prices inside and outside the European Union?
This is to keep things fair between European and non-European users. This fairness ensures that both European and non-European users are equally profitable to us.
We have different costs for europeans and non-europeans (taxes, credit card processing fees, etc). If you’d like all the details, you can find them here.
As for the storage, the cost we have as of today is €0.05 per GB. We don’t make any profit from storage. tagaway's users pay storage at cost. The slight price difference has to do with credit card processing fees.
And if storage gets cheaper for us, it will get cheaper for our users.
Why charge only in Euros?
Our wages are in euros, our costs are in euros, as well as our taxes. Having other currencies would complicate things for no good reason.