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Comment by thehodge | Hacker News Reader

Looks like they have got rid of the free plan...

(I'm not saying this as a negative thing, it's going to be really interesting to see the response to this, I know there was a blog post a while ago saying there hardly anyone on the free account upgraded) I'm using a free basecamp account but we only have one project and $20/$25 is just a little much for that a micro plan at $10 would be awesome :) )

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As others have posted here about other businesses, prices under around $20/month start to rapidly become unprofitable. One common reason cited is that a price of e.g. $10/mo doesn't allow any budget for support time, etc. Lower price points work for consumer applications with potentially massive scale. But businesses unfortunately need to pay for results.

Some assumptions, to be sure, but you say "we only have one project", so that implies multiple people, so if you are employed by this work you must be pulling in several thousand dollars per month. $20/mo for a product you need to (or at least want to) use to accomplish this work and earn money is an absolute pittance.

It depends on what value you put on basecamp, most of what we do is on git and we pay for a large github account.. I don't want to be a free customer but I disagree that $20 is nothing in the long term when most of the features offered to me I'll never use

Just because they might have a team working in a free version of Basecamp doesn't mean that they're pulling in money.

Four friends and I were using free basecamp to track a personal free-time project we are working to turn into something more. That's five people on free Basecamp, not making any money (in fact spending out of pocket), but it's at times been an invaluable resource. Just, for our scale, not $20+ a year invaluable.

I'm fine with Basecamp Next being "not for me" right now because of that, but that doesn't mean I'm not a little disappointed.

I agree. $20/mo is definitely going to be too expensive for a ton of potential customers. I guess it's a luxury that 37Signals can not only afford, but will maximize their profit and I would assume they have some good historical data to back up the decision.

I do think that there is a magic $5-9/mo range that individuals will pay without thinking too much. Above that amount, they start equating a subscription with a trip to the movies or a (cheap) night out and you've lost them.

I totally disagree, $20/mo for a service like Basecamp is not expensive. I pay $20-50/mo per month for a whole host of services (hosting, backup storage, payment processing, etc.) and don't really think twice about them since they're business expenses. FYI: I'm an individual who has a full-time job but does projects/apps at night with a separate LLC.

I agree--$20/mo is not expensive but like @thehodge says... it all adds up. I think that in this space tho, you have a huge market of people who are "pre-business" who just couldn't justify 5-10 $20 services a month when they are pre-profit or only making a few hundred a month off of their products. Basecamp could appeal to some of these folks with a sub $10 offering.

Agreed. Someone else here already pointed out "hey, time tracking in basecamp is limited - we use harvest and integrate". OK, so now you've got 2 $20/month services (or whatever harvest costs). Then another $10-$20/month for another service. And another. And another. And that's usually $10-$20/month per user. A small company could easily be paying $500/month for a few services for a handful of users. Are they getting $500 or more of value from it? Possibly, but smaller orgs tend to be more gunshy about spending money, however small, without free tiers. Perhaps those are the companies that you don't really want as customers anyway?

I think 37signals won't do that for the same reason Apple won't make a $399 laptop, they don't want to be in that business. That's not the business they're in, and knowing what business you're in and not in is extremely important. I'm sure there are a dozen Basecamp competitors with $10/mo plans that would probably fit your needs.

I totally disagree. Certainly hosting costs that much, backup usual not and payment processing never. When compared to services with a free tier like ZenDesk, Yammer, Twilio, Stripe, DropBox, BiBucket and Trello, I don't think your comment holds water at all.

For a consumer product, $5-9/month is probably a good price point depending on the product. To a business, $20 per month is a great starting price. Businesses have a different set of demands than a consumer. The value of Basecamp has definitely proven itself to be worthy of that rate. There are "free" services out there that do similar things, but to a business they probably feel more secure paying for a service, knowing that they'll be around for the foreseeable future.

$20 here, $40 there.. it all starts adding up..

Microsoft Office 365 cost $7 @ user, with Sharepoint Online, that is easy to use, as sort of the combination of Basecamp and Backpack.

I suppose the big difference is that Basecamp offers unlimited users.

I think $20 is cheap enough.. I'm wondering why they switched all prices to ending in 0 now and how that will affect conversions. I feel like we are always so used to ending in 9's or 7's

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