Table Of Contents
TL;DR
good, reliable software wins, you can charge a premium for it, and generous monthly cancellation conveys self-confidence in your own product.
My journey in mobile tariff land - chasing a cheaper tariff
For a long time I was a happy customer of SIMon Mobile, a German no-frills mobile provider. It was cheap, the tariff was cancelable every month, and it simply worked.
Then I churned. Truth be told, the reason was mundane: SIMon did not offer larger data tariffs at the time, and I wanted more data. A direct competitor - Lebara - had a bigger package for a similar price, so I switched. That was the entire decision process.
What “saving money” actually got me
Quite different, as it turns out. The quality at Lebara was consistently bad:
- Connections drop. Regularly, and without any obvious reason.
- No WiFi calling on my phone. A feature I had simply taken for granted before was suddenly gone.
- Latency went through the roof. On SIMon, my mobile latency was consistently around 10ms. On Lebara, it is at least 60ms - six times worse, every single day.
None of this shows up on a pricing page. On paper, I had “saved” a few euros and gained a few gigabytes. In practice, I had traded a product that just works for one that constantly reminds me of its existence - in the worst way. Ouch.
Churning back
So I looked at SIMon again - and I am moving back. The picture today:
- SIMon now offers larger, competitive tariffs. The original reason for my churn is gone.
- It is still cheap and no frills, and the tariff is cancelable every month.
- When I used it, latency was consistently around 10ms and calling just worked. No drama, no surprises.
Looking through the current offers, one thing stands out: SIMon is among the cheapest providers on the market, but consistently 1-2 EUR per month more expensive than the absolute cheapest competitors.
And that is completely fine. That 1-2 EUR is a pricing premium for a service that just works - and I am willing to pay it. I suspect most people are, once they have experienced the alternative. You only need to be burned once by dropped calls and 60ms latency to understand what those two euros actually buy.
But there’s a bigger lesson - especially for software product
The exact same dynamics apply to software products:
Good and reliable software WILL win. Customers churn for all kinds of reasons - a missing feature, a slightly cheaper competitor, plain curiosity. That is normal and you cannot prevent all of it. But if your product is genuinely reliable, many of them come back, because out there they learn what your product quietly did for them all along. Reliability is a feature that is invisible until it is missing.
You can charge a price premium for good and reliable software. You do not have to be the cheapest. Being 1-2 “euros” above the cheapest competitor is a perfectly defensible position - as long as the product is dependable. Racing to the absolute bottom usually means cutting exactly the things that make customers stay: quality, support, operational discipline. The premium for “it just works” is real, and customers pay it willingly.
Generous cancellation terms are an advantage, not a risk. A one-month cancellation period sounds scary at first - customers can leave any time! But it conveys self-confidence in your own product: we do not need a contract to keep you, the product keeps you. And there is a second-order effect that my own story demonstrates: low-friction exits mean low-friction returns. I churned away from SIMon, learned my lesson, and can now churn right back without renegotiating anything. A customer you locked in with a 24-month contract and who leaves angry at the end of it is gone forever. A customer who can leave easily, and does, is one bad competitor experience away from coming back.
Notice also what actually triggered my churn: a missing feature (larger data tariffs), not dissatisfaction. SIMon has since closed that gap. If you lose customers over a feature gap while your reliability is excellent, that churn is recoverable - fix the gap and keep the door open.
Takeaway
I churned to save a couple of euros and got worse quality and worse latency. Now I am going back to the provider that was slightly more expensive and simply worked - and the monthly cancellation terms on both sides are what makes this painless.
For anyone building software products, the lesson is worth internalizing: reliability wins in the long run, reliability justifies a price premium, and making it easy to leave is one of the strongest signals of confidence you can send - it is also what makes it easy to come back.
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- Photo on top by Javier Allegue Barros
