App.net pricing changes
blog.app.net
blog.app.net
The reason is Tent. If Tent drops the ball and doesn't fully execute the idea, someone else will. Their idea is bigger, better and far better maps onto the interest of various 3rd parties (such as hosted service providers) that wouldn't hesitate to support it. Commoditizing the social services is a great idea with balls and vision. Creating a paid Twitter clone is not.
http://www.informationweek.com/development/open-source/tent-...
2009: App.net will be done in a matter of months; the reason is OneSocialWeb
2005: App.net will be done in a matter of months; the reason is Appleseed
Why is this time different?
I did just listen to some guy tell me why he should get paid for 3 minutes. So that's something.
Yawn.
Please get off the "twitter clone" smackdown ... it's lame. App.net is a trustworthy "blackbox" which allows ANY social construct. It dovetails with Tent.
People are building Tor concepts, non-Zynga collaborative games, new messaging protocols, etc in App.net ... beyond twitter is easy. Indeed, it's hard to keep up with all the API enhancements, and the new developer ideas. My personal goal inside App.net is a construct which brings down the GFW (firewall) of China. (Im fluent in 中文, 25+ years).
No advertisements, paying developers well. Integrity about the future ecosystem. With a $1 million in the bank, one of the best geek hangouts on earth, and world-class integrity ... it ain't going away in months.
You'd be better off predicting that it's a heady time for new social protocols.
I don't get it. What's the advantage of this over regular internet? You use someone else's servers?
My reasoning is that it reaches too far without a safety net of a business model. Assuming Dalton is being truthful in his post, he's not cutting prices because he "didn't get traction" he's cutting prices because his business model is out performing his expectations, and rather than go for a higher net early on he's re-investing that margin into growing the user base.
Tent is going 'old school' like the old IETF protocols, that means waiting for adoption, having a variety of implementations, establishing a consensus, moving forward. That works great in a green field situation, but this isn't it. Look at the OpenMoko effort, free Phone OS, build it and they will come? No. Reaching too far without a model to nourish early adoption and growth. Influential? Sure but killer? Not so much.
Dalton has something which Tent does not, people willing to spend money to use it. That is why I think Tent will be a memory long before we see the end of App.net.
The HN/Reddit crowd is still a fairly closed crowd and no one else I know has even really mentioned App.net. Any time I bring up App.net it's met with the same "Twitter clone" skeptics.
I think it's a decent idea, but it's not really solving a hard problem. It's not feeding off of demand for a problem, but off of popularity from the HN hivemind; a crowd known for following trends over execution. I'm just a developer so I don't know much about running a business, but I cannot see how this can be sustainable when tech crowds are prone to move onto the next thing so quickly.
My observation was that App.net has paid users, enough of them to sustain growth apparently. Fundamentally people being paid to provide something do a better job than people who aren't paid to provide something (helps with the inevitable haters) In my experience paid users are a stronger signal than 'vision' or 'reach' as predictors of success.
We'll get a far better reading of the service once that year is up. In my experience of using annual subscription services/products the hype tends to fizzle out when the core group decide whether their initial investment was worth it. Given its current state I doubt it'll topple its closed competitors in twelve months and I see a large section of its core users ditching it for the next flavour of the week.
It reminds me a lot of MyFootballClub, a website that bought a English football team in the lower leagues with the promise of the community being completely responsible for player contracts, transfers and day-to-day running of the football club. A lot of people coughed up the cash for the site to buy Ebbsfleet United, but after a year most of them realised that what they were sold wasn't necessarily what they got and most decided not to renew. It's not an exact comparison, but I'll give App.net at least another year before I decide whether it's worth my time any more than Twitter.
I expect it will be all about the client capture, which is to say compelling client experiences based on App.net which will drive new development their way.
I think this is a great move.
We see a lot of posts on HN about raising the price to increase your userbase, but $50 was too high for a product in such an early release stage. Great for those die-hard early adopters (probably the people after whom Dalton was chasing), but terrible for the everyday Twitter user who is tired of the horrific signal-to-noise ratio on that service.
That said, my opinion would be that $24/year would be even better for an annual subscription. $2/mo is a lot of money for a "Twitter clone," but is cheap enough that it would be easy to convince your friends or colleagues to sign up. $36 might have hit the price point that I'll give it a shot as a (relatively) early adopter, but I'm not sure. $5/month, almost double the annual subscription fee, is too much for a thirty day trial run.
I'm one of the (few?) believers that app.net can really take off. I've tried Twitter, and while I'm relatively active, I can't help but feel that I'm lost in the oft-cited "echo chamber." I'm looking for a service with Twitter-like abilities, strong interaction and an intelligent community, and I think app.net will (someday) be it.
Congrats to Dalton for lowering the price in what must lead to hugely increased participation.
I'm curious... Considering your version of Twitter only consists of who you follow, why do you believe it would be better if those same people were elsewhere?
That goes for normal people too, when they pay something they tend to respect it a bit more. Forums have been doing this for years.
If you are talking about searching, the only way search is valuable is if a service gains critical mass, and the only way that happens is if the barrier to entry is low enough that enough users join the service, which will include spammers.
You can only DM people where you both follow each other.
Most of the people I follow on Twitter I found in this way. An echo chamber is not what I go to Twitter for.
Lowering the price to $36 after the initial "kickstarter" doesn't scream success to me. If it is that good people would have joined en masse for $50, no?. Will the price be discounted again in two months after everybody who's willing to pay $36 has joined?
It's like a more desperate grab for customers, but unwilling to admit that the model may not be right.
I never really understood this, it seems more logical to me to give all members the developer perks. Most of the users won't use them, and those that do are helping to promote the app.net service and get new subscribers.
Post something on Twitter mentioning "IPad", you'll get a lot of spam accounts replying. It's hard to engage with other users if you have to comb through the spam.
Likewise, they actually make more money with people on a monthly plan, assuming they have a customer LTV > 12 months. So, they're making $60/yr on monthly subscribers (20% more +$10), and their annual plan, while a 23% reduction from previous pricing (-$14), which means only a $4 discount on an average customer basis assuming they have an even mix of monthlies who stick around at least 12 months and their annuals. So, they would just need to grow their market such that they only need to have more monthlies than annuals, and they're making MORE money in the aggregate. (Do the math -- you'll see a mix of 58.33% monthlies and 41.67% annuals on the new plan is roughly break even with 100% annuals on the old plan).
Or even more starkly to show how this works -- if they didn't grow their annual base AT ALL, and dropped the price, they would only need 23.4% as many monthlies as annuals to break even to cover the difference. So, if they had 10,000 annuals, even if they didn't grow that at all and gave them all a price break, they would only need 2,334 monthlies to make up the difference (just under 19% of the total combined audience). And odds are high that monthlies will be a lot more than 19% of their total base. Oh, and they'll probably grow their annual subscriptions anyways.
They can see that their rate of growth for monthlies, combined with a more compelling discount for an annual program will actually increase the bottom line. Solid pricing strategy.
I admire Dalton for moving down ONLY slightly on price. He actually raised it on the monthly, yet allowed people to test cheaply. It's worth the premium, Dalton is wise not to give it away.
PS - members are a dream demographic, and spend $5 on apps easily. Some developers have made $ thousands via app sales already. The developer revenue share model (just announced) accrues additionally on top of app sales each month.
2) App.net is NOT shooting for 1 million users. Not yet. Paul Graham challenged people in his PyCon keynote address to "build a Google Search for the top 10,000 geeks on earth". Dalton is responding to that in "social". He's not trying to scale quickly to 1 million users ... rather, he's wisely getting 10,000 top geeks involved, by sharing revenue and building a blackbox with integrity long term.
Rather than falling for a "must scale like Twitter" mindset ... ponder why Paul Graham himself suggested a smaller, ultra-geek laser focus.
Dalton is executing beautifully. Paying developers well is smart, and it's profitable. Economically when it does scale, this model has the potential to be off the charts. Patience.
A social network is not judged by the same sort of criteria, and so it's not at all clear to me why someone would apply the same strategy.
If App.net is to remain true to its mission, then that $20,000 should go up over time. And if it goes up over time, it is no longer so clear that subscription levels can remain as low as they are now.
We should ask how much money App.net is making. Similar services are upfront about what percentage they take from the subscriber's money. App.net needs to offer at least that level of transparency.
More importantly, App.net is still a closed box, just like Twitter. App.net still has to pay the bills, just like Twitter. When faced with the same decisions in the future, what prevent app.net from making similar decisions as Twitter?
Will $5 a user per month really cover their costs if they hit scale (I know they have other revenue streams, but I'm guessing they will have more users than anything else)?
With the $5 monthly fee I think people are more likely to continue paying for it - there is no time where they will be forced to reevaluate the value the service provides.
The other popular option is rivr, which has a slightly different take on things, and maybe not as pretty as others, but is free.
Did anyone else not receive this (yet?)?
Homework for the bored hacker: create a graph with user-ID and days. The IDs are sequential integers. See https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec/blob/master/resources/...
Why give up so much revenue when it seems like price isn't holding them back?
They see monthly plans as a way to get to a larger market, which explains why that drove pricing decisions.
App.net is just capitalizing on those annoyed with Facebook/Twitter developer policies. Great for their bank account and a really smart idea, but I still don't see value for anyone else. As someone else once said, "App.net is a social network for people who have $50 to show-off that they have $50 to blow." That's not a party I feel compelled to attend.
I'm open to a convincing argument though.