This is because the psychological upper limit at which people start to take notice of what appears on their credit card statements when they decide to decrease their monthly expenses seems to be around the $20 mark.
As long as you're below $20 plenty of people will continue a subscription until their card expires even if they don't use a service, above that the cancellations go up, so do the chargebacks and the retention goes down.
This has been researched ad nauseaum by the services you refer to, which is why they all converge on the same price range.
Hmm, this makes me think that I'm charging way too little for historious at $3/mo, but, then again, something tells me that if I charged $15 nobody would buy...
I'm going to write a little blog post, just for you (and for everybody else that earns money through subscriptions). If it works out you owe me a beer. Stay tuned, back in 45 minutes.
As one anecdote, I wouldn't have paid for historious at more than the $20 a year I paid (I hesitated, and decided it was worth it due to the usefulness and the fact you seemed like a cool bunch). It's a cool service, but not THAT cool. I could always go back to forgetting URLs, or using Google Reader to remember them.
Thanks for both the support and the feedback! I also think that that price is about fair, we just need to convert more users to subscribers, I guess...
As long as you're below $20 plenty of people will continue a subscription until their card expires even if they don't use a service, above that the cancellations go up, so do the chargebacks and the retention goes down.
This has been researched ad nauseaum by the services you refer to, which is why they all converge on the same price range.