Pricing

Pros: simplest to explain and build — it's the one dimension (storageLimitGb) already in the data model; familiar mental model users already have from Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud; predictable recurring revenue.

Cons: charges for the cheapest part of the product (blob storage) while giving away the expensive, differentiated part (proof-of-life monitoring, delivery guarantees) for free at every tier, as the table above makes visible; emotionally wrong fit — "pay monthly or your legacy gets capped" undercuts a permanence pitch; cloud storage keeps getting cheaper, eroding pricing power over time.

Pros: matches the emotional pitch — "pay once, delivered whenever, no risk it lapses"; no risk of a deceased user's card declining and blocking delivery of something already promised; easy to understand at checkout.

Cons: no recurring revenue to fund indefinite hosting or the ongoing proof-of-life monitoring service (that costs money every month forever, for a fee paid once — visible above as an optional add-on rather than a built-in), doesn't map to anything in the current model (no purchase/credit concept exists); hard to price correctly since "store and monitor this forever" has no natural endpoint.

Pros: prices the actually hard-to-build, differentiated features (delivery scheduling, dead-man's-switch, executor workflow) rather than commodity storage; recurring revenue funds the genuinely ongoing cost of proof-of-life monitoring; can be designed so already-scheduled deliveries survive a lapsed subscription.

Cons: most complex tier logic to build and enforce server-side; still a subscription, so still carries some "what if I stop paying" anxiety unless the lock-in-scheduled-messages safeguard is built carefully; free tier gets no proof-of-life safety net at all, which may feel like a bait-and-switch for a "digital legacy" product.

There are no fixed plans in this model — the three columns above are illustrative usage examples, not selectable tiers.

Pros: fair — you pay for exactly what you use; revenue scales directly with the actual infra cost (COGS), so margins stay predictable as the platform grows.

Cons: variable, unpredictable monthly bills feel wrong for a grief/legacy product where people want certainty, not a metered utility bill; metering + usage-based invoicing is meaningfully more billing infrastructure to build than flat tiers; nothing in today's UI expects a variable bill (the Vault page shows a flat quota bar, not a running cost).

Pros: aligns each charge with a real cost event — drafting is free and cheap to host, "finalize and schedule" is exactly when you'd want to fund permanent storage, and the subscription only covers the genuinely ongoing service (monitoring); best fit for the "won't vanish if I stop paying" promise since the core deliverable is paid for once.

Cons: the most complex of the five to build (two billing mechanisms, plus a new "finalized/locked" message state that doesn't exist in the current model) and the hardest to explain to a non-technical user at checkout; risk of users skipping the optional subscription and then having no proof-of-life safety net despite having paid for delivery.