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Comment by kabuks | Hacker News Reader

Folks, thanks for the great feedback. I'm especially curious what you think of our business model:

The first 500 credits are free. Every month we'll add another 200 free credits. (each credit is one text message to one person)

Users can also get more credits by inviting others to use ClassParrot. Inviteer and invitee both get an extra 200 credits.

Paid plans offer unlimited credits:

For a single teacher $9/month (or $90/year) For schools up to 20 teachers $100/month (or $1000/year) For schools with more than 20 teachers $200/month (or $2000/year)

Thoughts?

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Your annual pricing doesn't offer any discount.

If I was a teacher I would simply purchase a month-to-month subscription and not pay for your service during June/July or July/August(depending on your school system) when there are no school days.

From a personal standpoint I would consider offering some kind of "account parking" so that teachers can suspend their account for a 2 week period during christmas break. It never 'feels right' to pay for a service when you're not able to use it.

Some thoughts- Instead of teachers and school plans, have you thought about having a parent/student plan? Every time to sign up to receive messages, you get X free and then you have to pay to receive the rest. This way you are pushing the burden to purchase on the parents's shoulders and this will also ensure that there is a parent 'by-in' for ClassParrot. Did you survey parents and students about this?

Also, if 1 credit = 1 message, then why not just call it a 'message' to keep things simple. So you get 500 free 'messages' and you pay for 500+ 'messages'.

To emphasize your value prop and highlight the safety, landing page message could again say 'secure' instead of 'hassle free'. My rule is that repetition is good.

I wish you the best, but getting a school to pony up for this is going to be difficult. Their budgets are extremely tight (at least in Texas). My wife is a teacher and she frequently finds her spending her personal money on classroom supplies.

She's not alone. On average teachers spend $430 out of pocket per school year on school supplies.

We don't want to add to that burden, and would really really like to find a way to have the schools pay.

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