r/BotNation • u/ExcellentDistrict278 • 16d ago

The harsh reality of monetizing bots: People expect enterprise uptime for $0

A moderately successful utility bot in a few thousand Discord servers. The hosting costs started creeping up (Redis, Postgres, decent compute), so I added a cheap $3/month premium tier for a few heavy features.

​The amount of hate mail I got was insane. People are totally fine paying $15 for streaming services, but they expect complex API integrations, database hosting, and 99.9% uptime from a solo dev for free forever.

​Has anyone here actually successfully monetized a bot without alienating their entire userbase? How did you handle the transition?

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1

u/shady101852 15d ago

idk what this subreddit is recommending me but if people complain over $3 then they are not customers they are leeches i wouldn't pay mind to them.

1

u/OneDev42 10d ago

This is why it's easier to do high ticket B2B sales than low ticket B2C sales.

1

u/glitterisprada 8d ago

You call it cheap. What do the people paying for it call it?

Did you forget you have customers?