Which of your paid software / products / subscriptions give you the biggest consumer surplus?
This discussion got me thinking about this question, as I was recommending NextDNS.
Consumer surplus is the difference between the price you’d be willing to pay, and the price you actually pay.
For example, if you pay $5 per month for something, but you’d actually be willing to pay $20 each month, then the consumer surplus is $15 or 300% I.e. the product is literally worth $15 or 300% more to you than you’re paying.
From all the MPU-relevant things I buy, NextDNS delivers to me the greatest consumer surplus. £1.49pm seems like a steal for blocking ads on all my devices, and protecting my kids’ devices from many nasties. I’d happily pay 5x as much (£7.45) - i.e. a consumer surplus of 400%
FTAoD. I’ve no relationship with NextDNS! I’m just a happy customer and am using it here as a personal example to illustrate consumer surplus. I’m really interested to hear what other MPU-relevant products and services people perceive as delivering them the greatest consumer surplus.
Note: there are threads elsewhere about free products which “should be” paid. In this thread I’m specifically asking about paid/commercial products for which you’d be willing & able to pay more.
Hmm, it might be NewsBlur ($24/year) or Castro ($19/year.)
Both offer some kind of feed filtering/triage that I really find valuable. My personal demand is inelastic. On an aggregate market level they’re probably fairly priced.
Outside of business/media utilities, it’s probably some game whose price was driven down to a few dollars. The app store pre-subscription era is textbook consumer surplus.
I rarely think in terms of what I would pay for something. Only what I won’t pay for something. If they want to charge me $10 and I’m OK with it, I don’t worry myself with figuring out how I would react to a price rise. I just make the call again if the price goes up.
I rarely think about calculating what I would pay, but I am often gratefully aware of how much more value I’m getting out of something than what I paid for it, particularly when it comes to software.
