Our take
We'd rather answer to the students paying for this
We're students building Wonaride. Colleges and venture capital firms aren't funding it. Our model is student subscriptions, priced as affordably as we can make them. We want the people using the product to be the people it has to answer to.
Charging students is a decision we need to justify
A subscription is another expense when you're already trying to pay for school. Calling the company student-built doesn't erase that. The product has to save enough work to earn its price. If you're already happy with your own spreadsheet and folders, you don't owe us a subscription. Public scholarship information should still be useful to you.
Affordability has to show up in the product
We try to keep the subscription affordable, but we won't invent a universal number for what every student can spend. Judge the price shown to you against the features that are actually available. In particular, the current app is a preview with demo application activity. It isn't sending scholarship applications. Our plans for automation aren't a reason to pay for work the preview doesn't do.
We aren't building a loan business on the side
Wonaride has no loan products and no plans to add them. We want the reason to improve an application feature to be that students need it. That still leaves plenty of hard product decisions, including what to charge for and which repeated tasks to tackle first. We'd rather make those decisions with the students using the product than optimize the app around a lender's next sale.
Our position on loan productsYou should be able to tell whether it's helping
A saved hour, a document you didn't have to hunt down again, or an application you actually finished is a useful result. A dashboard full of impressive-looking numbers isn't enough. That's how we want Wonaride to be judged. We don't need you to love our business model; we need the work to be easier because you used the product.