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Comment by jeremymcanally | Hacker News Reader

I really like this idea, but the pricing (to me) is astronomical.

I'm guessing I'm not in your target market, though. That is, someone who would use this for say, RSVPs to church events or something. Though, your demo would tell me otherwise. I'm a little confused about market fit, I guess.

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We've been getting mainly B to E interest and our major competitors in those markets have starting plans of $1000/month. But we're interested in feedback. How would you revise the pricing?

My issue with pricing isn't the lower plan really, 60 doesn't seem so much, but the 10,000 text max plan seems to be too low for a lot of useful applications of this software. If I want to reach a 10,000 person incoming freshman class at a university then I would need to buy multiple plans just to serve them a multi-question conversation. The other thing is that you could provide higher priced (i.e. well over 1k plans) with TONS of texts available, and maybe subsidize the lower plans to increase first time adoption and increase the odds of being used for a bigger project/campaign/effort.

That's a great idea. We're giving a first month free for the $60 plan but subsidizing it could get people hooked. Do you think we should offer a much larger plan (hypothetically would 100,000 texts for 4k/month be plausible?)

I don't know your cost structure/margins, so I really can't give a specific set of numbers in good faith. In my relatively limited experience in polling/interviewing large numbers of people (a couple projects) I have gotten the impression that my example of engaging 1000-2000ppl/month is unusual. The tools we used seem to have been geared towards 1-2000/day or more (inferred/back of envelope). This makes me think there may be a market for you guys in the much higher volume brackets which might let you subsidize the lower end and draw folks in. First month free definitely cool idea though. I will definitely find a way to use this if possible.

We will make the first month free deal more obvious. I appreciate your feedback and honesty. Get in touch with us via email (on our site) and I'd love to chat more about your use cases.

I really don't get how this could be the case.

I built something similar to this for my startup; it didn't have a pretty UI we could let our marketing team use, but it also didn't cost nearly $0.10/text - it cost $0.01/text after we went into production, and was free while we were devving it.

I would charge a fixed rate per month for the pretty front-end; that's what startups/marketing teams/etc. would sub for. I'd then charge for the variable SMS cost at nearly what you can pay a Twilio/Tropo for them, and make it a unified, uncapped plan.

How are you going to survive? I could build this in a weekend and be profitable charging a quarter of the price. If this catches on I imagine someone will do just that.

Doesn't that apply, or was applicable at some given point in time, to the vast majority of currently successful startups? http://www.quora.com/Startups/How-do-you-make-a-new-business...

potentially, but the vast majority also offer some benefit to staying with them. i.e. your friends are there, user incentives to promote growth crediting you to keep using the system, some form of retention. Here there is none and the price is outrageous for what is being done.

Anyone willing to put in the work to create a serious clone product and talented enough to succeed at it probably has ideas of their own they'd want to implement instead.

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