CrashPlan Big sale | Hacker News Reader

CrashPlan Big sale

crashplan.com

21 pointsdominis13 comments

I feel that discounts that don't apply to existing customers must be risky: I already have a Crashplan account and am not pleased that people who show up "after me" get to pay only a fifth of what I'm paying currently.

Hmmm. I just re-upped my 3 year subscription that had 3 months remaining to a new 4 year subscription. New customers only get a discount on one year's service, the way I read it.

Note: the longer the sale goes on, the more the discount decreases. (It decreases 1% every hour counting down from 100%).

I didn't notice that yesterday, and it's worth keeping in mind when reading this submission.

In my case, it might actually have had the effect of discouraging me from considering the offer, because the price went up since I last checked. Does anyone else feel the same way, or is this a discount model that you would recommend keeping in mind for another occasion?

80% off is still a pretty good deal.

But, knowing that the same product was 100% off mere hours ago will certainly disgruntled potential buyers. I think this model is more likely to alienate customers than it is to entice them.

On your theory, products should never go on discount. Clearly the world feels differently.

Just, no. You lack a fundamental understanding of the psychology that underlies my point. Knowledge that you are missed out on a more lucrative deal makes the current price less appealing when juxtaposed against the missed deal. This is identical to the cognitive process that causes people distress when they miss refilling their parking meter by minutes. If you leave your car on the street for 3 days, it should not seem that unreasonable that you receive a ticket. However, in the cases where one approaches one's car while the ticket-writer is still present but the ticket has already been written, the person is more likely to flip their shit. The latter is far more upsetting because the person "missed it by that much."

Are they a stable company that will exist in a year or two? They sometimes give away one year plans for free (go to slickdeals and search for crashplan), which makes me wonder if they are desperate to sign up new customers.

For something important like backup I don't want to start using a product that may fold in the near-term future.

edit: it seems the free deals are for people who want to switch from carbonite, but they work for anyone. So I guess it's not exactly what I thought: https://www.crashplan.com/carboniteswitcher/

I hope they will still be there... They are not just a random company. I have been using it at my previous work company (strongly suggested by our IT group) and have been really happy with it to the point that 2 years ago I purchased for their Black Friday offers a 3 years plan...

Since then I had one bad HD crash and I was happy to be able to restore from CrashPlan... After a little bit over a day of syncing the restore was complete and I lost only around the last 10 minutes of my work which is not bad at all.

So happy customer here for over 2 years now, and I have already extended my subscription by one more year at regular price.

I forgot to mention that a few big corporation like Apple, Google and a few others use their enterprise solution (aka CrashPlan backup solution hosted directly in house by the IT group)... So they definitely did strike some deals with big names.

Thanks for the feedback, that's what I wanted to hear!

"which makes me wonder if they are desperate to sign up new customers."

For this kind of product, the 'one year free' strategy seems like a decent lure to me. If you use the service extensively, at the end of that year, you will have x GB of backups that you need to move elsewhere fast if you do not continue your subscription. That is way more of a hassle than, say, changing your Internet provider, phone company, or health insurance (at least in some parts of the world).

So, I guess their ploy is that users who cost them a lot during their free year will stay for years.

I would love to see the performance data for this campaign.

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