For a while, TenderNest's paid plans had two placeholder numbers on the pricing page that I couldn't really have defended if you'd pushed me on them. A few pounds a month got you a few hundred extra messages. Round numbers, picked mostly because they looked like the kind of numbers other apps use, not because they meant anything to anyone sending a note to their partner.
The trouble is server space isn't free. Every message, every voice note, every photo sitting in someone's nest costs something small to store and serve, and that small amount adds up once enough people are actually using the thing. So there's a real tension built into this from day one. I want as many people as possible sending each other notes without a second thought about cost, but I can't hand out unlimited storage forever and hope it works out.
I sat with that longer than I'd like to admit. Cheaper and more generous felt right for the vibe of the app, which was never built to be something you check fifty times a day. It's meant to be slow. A note here, a voice message there. So "unlimited messages for a fiver" never actually made sense, because nobody needed unlimited. What they needed was to never have to think about a limit at all.
That's roughly how I landed on the number that stuck: thirty extra messages a month on the cheaper plan. Not because thirty means anything technically, but because it maps onto something a person can picture without doing maths. About one a day. If you're the kind of person who sends your partner a little something most days, that quietly covers you and you never notice the ceiling. The higher plan doubles it, for people leaning on the app a bit harder or splitting their attention across more than one nest.
Annual pricing worked itself out from the same logic: a full year for the price of eleven months, which felt honest rather than "because everyone else does it that way." Under twenty pounds a year for something you might genuinely use every day struck me as fair in a way the old £2.99 for an arbitrary 300 messages never quite did, even though the maths says the old number was more generous on paper.
There's no clean formula for pricing something like this. In the end I just asked myself what number I'd be fine seeing on a receipt if I were the one paying it, for an app I actually wanted to keep using.
