people trying to get more people to sign up for cohost plus or trying to come up with ways to make cohost plus more enticing really need to reread this part of the financial report:
"this is why we originally planned to build cohost only as a side project on the way to building a platform for tipping and subscriptions like ko-fi or patreon (hereafter referred to as "eggbux" because it's less to write), rather than depending on cohost plus for funding indefinitely. our conversion rate of MAU to paid subscribers is already incredibly high; the industry standards are around 4-8% and we've been able to clock in above that basically since we launched cohost plus. trying to get that number higher will see seriously diminishing returns and isn't really worth putting a ton of time and effort into."
cohost has an absurdly high conversion rate, like a lot of sites would kill to have the number of subscribers they have compared to the overall userbase. which sounds really good on the surface, until you consider that having such a high rate makes it unlikely to grow that much more, and thus there's really no more room to exploit that as a moneymaker. if you've already gone above and beyond in subscriber rates, you probably aren't getting that many more subscribers, and if that isn't covering your costs, you need to find other ways to make money.
the devs are trying to tell you that this isn't the path to sustainability for them. whether or not there is a path...i guess only time will tell that, but this one isn't it.
I think a lot of people just really don't get how much money we're talking about here. They're losing like $10k a month right now, which is probably not actually the norm--we've seen this in cohost history a few times now where Elon makes someone mad or in this case Tumblr Matt or whatever his name is made people mad, so they get a huge influx of users. Some of that huge influx is going to buy a year's subscription to Cohost upon joining, which means a lot of extra money for that one month, but they wont see any more money from that person for another year. Cohost has been inconsistent about how they calculate that in their financial reports, but even if we only look at monthly subs, you're going to get a bunch of monthly subs from new people rushing in that may decide to cancel the next month because it wasn't what they wanted it to be. These big influx months are outliers. But at BEST, they're losing $10k a month. Chances are last month when they were losing $20k that was more average. In past months in the last year they've lost as much as $40k. There are probably a ton of Cohost users who get as much in their yearly salary as Cohost has lost in a month.
Even the $10k a month...that's a lot of people that have to give Cohost $5. And like I said, there's already more people on Cohost than your average site that are willing to give them $5 a month and already are. So the number of people left who are willing to give Cohost $5 and aren't yet is not going to be that high. And...they can't just do it one month. You can't put on a concert to save the rec hall for this one. You have to put the concert on every single month and hope people don't drop off AT ALL. And this is before you even get into the massive debt backlog, this is just to stop the bleeding.
This is a structural problem that a one time fundraiser isn't going to fix. Throwing $5 at this isn't going to fix this. It's too much money. And I know people will call this doomer posting and hater posting and whatever but it's just...math! It's just math! The numbers aren't there and really really liking the website doesn't fix the numbers and throwing $5 at it doesn't fix the numbers in any meaningful way. If you want to give Cohost $5 then it's your money, but I really need people to look at the information given in the latest financial post, and in past financial posts, and see that "business as usual, hope our funder comes back" isn't enough to fix things in the span of roughly 2-3 weeks, and things will not in fact be business as usual when payroll runs out, and giving them $5 isn't going to stop that.
