My pricing strategy was to copy one of my competitors and now I can’t change that.

My pricing is $19/month since there was a competitor who priced their service at $24 per month, and I wanted to make sure that mine would come across as cheaper and more friendly. I didn’t even use a spreadsheet for that. No survey was conducted.

In eight months of running my project, support eats up half an hour of my time every day and the hosting bills doubled twice. My $19 barely covers the cost of maintaining the service, and any attempt to raise the price will feel very punitive to the users who trusted me first.

Is anybody else in the same situation? How do you plan to increase the price?