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If you have any doubt that we live in the idiocracy timeline, let us cogitate here on the economic absurdity that almost every digital service or good offered in the current year has a free version and then starts at about $10 a month or $100 a year.

Years ago, I paid $2 for lifetime access to the premium version of the Sleep Cycle app. It turns your phone or tablet into a smart alarm clock that wakes you up at the ideal time between REM cycles. If you need an alarm clock, it actually works pretty well and improved my sleep for years - for two bucks.

Once upon a time, I paid about $40 for a lifetime Brain.FM membership, this is an app/website that produces awesome holosync-style psychoactive music for focus, relaxation, meditation, or sleep. Their focus tracks really are an enabler of creative flowstate for me; they provided the auditory wind in my sails while I penned two books, scripted hundreds of videos, and created both my magnum opus course for men and Limitless Mindset's new flagship transformation program. Pretty sweet for forty bucks!

I got life-changing value (for going on half a decade now) out of these digital offerings precisely because they were reasonably priced.

Let's look at an example of another digital personal empowerment tool, that's got its pricing wrong (in my opinion)...

More recently, I trialed the Othership breathwork app. It provides guided breathwork sessions (somewhat similar to guided meditation sessions) for starting the morning right, some pick-me-up energy in the midafternoon, relaxation, gratitude, getting to sleep, and even partner breathwork sessions (for sexytime!) The audio engineering makes the tracks a sublime pleasure to listen to, while there's some room for improvement with the design/UI of the app itself. But when the lengthy free trial that Othership generously extended me ended, I stopped doing breathwork with the app because it cost $18/monthly or $130/yearly.

Now, I'm really not shy about investing money into my health and well-being, a significant portion of our household income goes into supplements, self-quantification, healthy food, and gym memberships. But $130/year for an app membership? Sorry Othership, no thanks! And the Othership offer is similar to so many I see these days across the internet, overpriced. Here's why...

* It's just an app that plays MP3s of guided breathwork sessions. Let's say that I spent two whole hours finding, downloading, and converting to MP3 the best publicly available breathwork sessions on the internet and organizing them in a VLC playlist (emulating what Othership does) - my time would be "worth" $65/hour (this would take a lot less than two hours in reality). If an app costs so much that my digital DIYing of it values my time at above $50/hour, I won't pay for it. My first job was cleaning grocery store floors for $7.25 an hour, so I'm really not above $50 an hour!

* An app that costs $130 a year should be PERFECT. It MUST work flawlessly and instantaneously on every device. It should have every feature my heart desires. It should have a design/UI that would make Leonardo Davinci cry. The Othership app is good, but NOT that good.

* For $130, I expect to be personally served by another human being in some small way. The website hosting services that I've paid for most of my adult life often cost less than $130 a year and include real human beings that I can call up or email anytime I have a problem with my website. With an app that just delivers MP3s, nobody is really serving me personally.

I like what the folks at Othership are all about, I appreciate the creativity and effort that clearly go into their guided meditation tracks, and I'd love to support their mission. Othership would be a total no-brainer for me and many others at $20 a year or $40 for a lifetime membership. I'm disappointed that they have deprived me of the opportunity to reward them by grossly overpricing their offering!Instead, they've turned me into a "free rider" - I've cost them server resources for my trialing of their app. I'm a (very small) part of the reason some of their customers have to pay $130 a year, for an app. I don't think Othership is overpriced because the folks behind it are rapacious capitalists. I think it's a case of unoriginal thinking; entrepreneurs see that everyone else is doing digital subscription services at around a hundred bucks a year so they figure that's what they should offer. 

But Othership is far from the only digital offering getting its pricing wrong...