I am currently working on two projects simultaneously. One is a bit larger in scale and more classic SaaS in that regard, the other one is a small Chrome extension that I intially. wanted to tie to a Saas-like service. I wondered about the business model for this extension for a while. I mainly built this extension for myself and then thought others might enjoy it too. Generally, subscriptions have the obvious benefits in terms of recurring revenue and people who sign up for a subscription usually feel more tied to your product and brand more heavily.
Yet after some deliberation I decided to charge a one-time fee for the Pro version only. I'd like to pretend I did this after some heavy market analysis and weighing all options. To be honest it actually came down to a privacy angle. The extension I built records some browsing behavior (websites visited, scrolling, etc.) and if I offer a dashboard that is tied to a user account I wouldn't feel all that comfortable in terms of security and legal risks. It's one thing to have someone's email address, another to have concrete browsing data. Now the extension saves everything locally in Chrome and doesn't send it to any servers. Given that design I felt bad charging for a monthly fee. So it's a one-time lifetime fee instead.
I don't have much experience with running online businesses so who knows if this will backfire eventually or if the user base will always stay so small that none of this will be all that important in the grand scheme of things. I currently charge 20 USD for the lifetime fee which seems way steeper (in an emotional not rational way) than charging 4 USD monthly for example. I'll see how that goes for now.
The extension can be found here, for anyone who's interested. It's a tiny mood tracker that checks in with you occasionally and then gives you insights on how your browsing behavior and mood correlate. It's not world changing but if you're into self-development, it might be worth a try.