On pricing
blog.historio.us
blog.historio.us
As I subscribe to more and more web services I frankly get tired of seeing the recurring fee show up either in my inbox, or in PayPal or on my CC statement.
There is definitely value to me as a consumer to pay for a service as I consume it, to spread out cost and risk, but there is a threshold where the convenience of an annual payment outweighs the pay-as-you-go pricing.
I just don't want the monthly reminder that I'm paying for something. Keep in mind, that before SAS, apart from recurring utility bills and rent/mortgage, most people's model of a subscription was a magazine. Most of those are annual payments.
BTW, I think the annual vs. monthly threshold for me is somewhere between $40 and $70 per year. It's dependent on the service itself, but for services in that range I'd opt for annual.
Edit: Removed duplicate word.
Of course, there's the old "one in the hand, two in the bush" aspect as well, which gives an added reason for a discount.
The more important factor to me, though, is cost and that usually not only involves storing some data as in the case of historious, but also support requests and scaling costs - when you have a paying user base scaling just won't be that much of pain point.
So, I'll go with a free 30 Day trial period after which the user has to decide, whether he'd like to sign up and pay. That way I can easily handle a couple of thousand users on one server and have more time left to spend on development instead of suporting nonpaying customers.
Free or Freemium only makes sense to me, if the presence of more users provides value to paying users, e.g. okcupid, Skype, and other network-effect businesses.
Isn't it better to offer an unlimited, resource constrained plan? Note: you can still let them use all the features but with limited resources.
Advantages: 1. You get permission to send them product related emails. 2. They hit the resource limits quickly thereby encouraging them to upgrade.
We do something similar at Trafficspaces and it works well for us. Unlimited free trial but with very low resource usage.
Just my 2 cents.
It works out much better than a time-based trial, which I don't think makes very much sense when you can have other factors.
Hardest bit about fremium model is where to draw the line.
By "paid support" did you just mean premium accounts? If so, I 100% agree that premium accounts are a great idea.
We plan on giving back to the community for this help by posting the results on our blog. Thanks!
I'll probably cave and go for the $6/m thing, but I don't need any of the features so it feels like I'm paying for something I'll never use. The free package would be fine for me, all I want to do is use it to historify sites and search them. I think you need to find a balance between the features required for users and pricing. It might sound stupid, but to me if you had 2 feature for $6/m and I used them both I'd be more likely to buy than if you had 10 features and I used 2 for $6/m, because the "smart spender" in me thinks "Why pay for 10 features when I only need 2? That's me wasting $4 a month!".
The price doesn't matter to me, I love your service and I'd pay $20 a month if that's what you requested, but when you're selling 6 features and I need 2 it seems poor value for money, and what matters to most is value for money, however silly that is.
Psychology has a lot to do with pricing, what you say is true, as silly as it sounds. The problem is that someone might find that the two features that work for him are different from the ones that work for you, so it's a hard problem :/ The best solution is to have pricing packages, but we don't have a clear hierarchy of things that are more important than others, so it's not very easy there either.
Also, aren't you paying $3/mo? The new prices shouldn't affect you, and we sort of ended that experiment and reverted back to the old prices.
But one thing hit me on your pricing page, you highlighted the most expensive plan - sure it is cheaper in the long run, but as consumer 5/6 $ is below my threshold of caring(if I wanted to use your service), whereas spending $40 means I have to consider it to a greater extend (and I am a lot less likely to buy it).
Since you make more money from the $6 plan, I would suggest you highlight that, or spell out how much I will be paying a month if I choose the other deal.
To clarify, the high price is per year, the low is per month.
I am used to ticks and crosses showing features that either are or are not present, in this case though there is a feature (even though its a negative one) "affiliate links" that is not not present. Kinda obscure.
Perhaps you could just have a smiley or frowning face next to each feature, that way you would see that the paid plans have more "good" things? eg: :) - tags! :) - filter by date :( - no tags when historifying :( - no rss :( - affiliate links
Or something to that effect.
The faces idea sounds great, thanks!
I'm guessing that would take care of cleanup very very well, while not inconveniencing users in the least. Users who use the service frequently will never even see the email, since only inactive users get it.
We might implement that very, very soon.
I don't think you should worry too much about this. Someone who abandons a free service for an inordinate amount of time shouldn't expect to see their data. Especially when the cost of storing such data isn't nominal.
Send them one or two reminders and you should be fine.
We plan to send an email one month after the user's last activity, and then delete the documents (just the documents, not the account, just in case) a month after that.
I wish more cloud services realized that they can have a pretty generous policy re: killing user's data.
It's like timeouts in Redis/memcached: doubling the TTL won't generally double memory usage, or anything close to it, for most types of data. The more important issue is having timeouts vs. unbounded waste; the length of the timeout is so much less important that you could afford to be pretty generous.
I think that, by lowering the free limit to 300 and culling inactive users' data, we won't need to worry about cost again. We are already in the green (very much so) from the great support we have gotten from paid users, but this will allow us to focus on improving the service rather than worry how we'll scale all that abandoned user data.