
On pricing - revorad
http://blog.historio.us/on-pricing
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8ig8
I'm not sure if this helps in your pricing analysis, but personally I'm always
looking for a discounted annual rate for services that are around your price
range. Thanks for offering one. It's a big plus in my mind.

As I subscribe to more and more web services I frankly get tired of _seeing_
the recurring fee show up either in my inbox, or in PayPal or on my CC
statement.

There is definitely value to me as a consumer to pay for a service as I
consume it, to spread out cost and risk, but there is a threshold where the
convenience of an annual payment outweighs the pay-as-you-go pricing.

I just don't want the monthly reminder that I'm paying for something. Keep in
mind, that before SAS, apart from recurring utility bills and rent/mortgage,
most people's model of a subscription was a magazine. Most of those are annual
payments.

BTW, I think the annual vs. monthly threshold for me is somewhere between $40
and $70 per year. It's dependent on the service itself, but for services in
that range I'd opt for annual.

Edit: Removed duplicate word.

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StavrosK
We realise that, and that's exactly why we offered the discounted yearly rate.
Another reason is that payment services charge too much for payments of $2-3,
so we save more money with an annual rate and can pass the savings to you.

Of course, there's the old "one in the hand, two in the bush" aspect as well,
which gives an added reason for a discount.

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dageroth
I'd find the number intersting how many users would pay, if there were no free
option available - my take is that it would be much more than the one percent
of users that seem to be the rule in the freemium model. Of course a free plan
attracts more potential users in the first place, which means the cake is
smaller, so it's hard to evaluate what yields more paying users...

The more important factor to me, though, is cost and that usually not only
involves storing some data as in the case of historious, but also support
requests and scaling costs - when you have a paying user base scaling just
won't be that much of pain point.

So, I'll go with a free 30 Day trial period after which the user has to
decide, whether he'd like to sign up and pay. That way I can easily handle a
couple of thousand users on one server and have more time left to spend on
development instead of suporting nonpaying customers.

Free or Freemium only makes sense to me, if the presence of more users
provides value to paying users, e.g. okcupid, Skype, and other network-effect
businesses.

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DJN
I'm not a big fan of the 30 day trial because I think it adds extra friction
to the signup process. Especially when a credit card is required.

Isn't it better to offer an unlimited, resource constrained plan? Note: you
can still let them use all the features but with limited resources.

Advantages: 1\. You get permission to send them product related emails. 2\.
They hit the resource limits quickly thereby encouraging them to upgrade.

We do something similar at Trafficspaces and it works well for us. Unlimited
free trial but with very low resource usage.

Just my 2 cents.

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antidaily
I would like to see a comparison of Free Trials vs. Free Plans. And upgrades
from each.

~~~
StavrosK
We don't distinguish between the two, our free plan is resource-restricted,
and can thus be thought of as a trial...

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stackthat
Upgrade to support can be a revenue stream for a small startup but in the long
run obviously you can't rely on that.

Hardest bit about fremium model is where to draw the line.

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MicahWedemeyer
For most consumer-facing sites, I think paid support is a non-option, and
might even drive people away. The users tend to treat these services like they
would a utility company, albeit, a free one. They just expect it to always
work, all the time, and if anything goes wrong it's _your_ responsibility to
drop everything you're doing and fix it immediately.

~~~
stackthat
I agree, although to be completely free either you'll be next big thing (or
fairly big) like delicious in this case or you'll have a premium version.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Maybe I misunderstood your initial statement. I thought you were suggested a
"paid support" model, where the users pay to get technical or customer
support, much like some hosting companies charge.

By "paid support" did you just mean premium accounts? If so, I 100% agree that
premium accounts are a great idea.

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StavrosK
We would greatly appreciate it if you could take a minute to answer a four
(EDIT: turns out it's five)-question survey on pricing here:

<http://bit.ly/b2AUz9>

We plan on giving back to the community for this help by posting the results
on our blog. Thanks!

~~~
citricsquid
I just filled out your questionnaire but I don't think I'll submit it, my
thoughts don't really fit into the few fields provided, if I put that $2 is
what I'll pay it won't make sense. I don't know if you remember me, but I
asked about subscriptions back before you offered them and signed up once they
were live. For me historious is something that's neat but something I can go
with out, so sure I can afford the $6/m you're charging now but how little I
use it makes it really not worth it for me. I've been a member since you
posted about it on reddit and I have 166 historified sites, I use it to
bookmark interesting sites that I might need in the future, I don't care for
RSS feeds or auto-tweeting.

I'll probably cave and go for the $6/m thing, but I don't _need_ any of the
features so it feels like I'm paying for something I'll never use. The free
package would be fine for me, all I want to do is use it to historify sites
and search them. I think you need to find a balance between the features
required for users and pricing. It might sound stupid, but to me if you had 2
feature for $6/m and I used them both I'd be more likely to buy than if you
had 10 features and I used 2 for $6/m, because the "smart spender" in me
thinks "Why pay for 10 features when I only need 2? That's me wasting $4 a
month!".

The price doesn't matter to me, I love your service and I'd pay $20 a month if
that's what you requested, but when you're selling 6 features and I need 2 it
seems poor value for money, and what matters to most is value for money,
however silly that is.

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StavrosK
Hey Sam! Of course I remember you, thanks for subscribing (I'm also Poromenos
on reddit).

Psychology has a lot to do with pricing, what you say is true, as silly as it
sounds. The problem is that someone might find that the two features that work
for him are different from the ones that work for you, so it's a hard problem
:/ The best solution is to have pricing packages, but we don't have a clear
hierarchy of things that are more important than others, so it's not very easy
there either.

Also, aren't you paying $3/mo? The new prices shouldn't affect you, and we
sort of ended that experiment and reverted back to the old prices.

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MicahWedemeyer
Excellent analysis here. The cost of the free users really made me cringe. For
what I'm doing, cost for free and premium is pretty much the same (a couple
database rows), so I can afford to carry a lot of freeloaders. I can't say I
planned that, though. I got lucky.

~~~
StavrosK
Yep, most services won't have anything approaching our cost. A commenter on
the blog offered a good compromise: Send the user an email after, say, two
months of them not logging in, saying "click here to keep your account or wait
30 days to have it cleared out".

I'm guessing that would take care of cleanup very very well, while not
inconveniencing users in the least. Users who use the service frequently will
never even see the email, since only inactive users get it.

We might implement that very, very soon.

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DJN
_One way to deal with the "stale data" problem is to prune old users from the
system, but many people will be understandably dissatisfied with this, and it
is not recommended._

I don't think you should worry too much about this. Someone who abandons a
free service for an inordinate amount of time shouldn't expect to see their
data. Especially when the cost of storing such data isn't nominal.

Send them one or two reminders and you should be fine.

~~~
StavrosK
Yep, that makes sense. We're actually just implementing this now, hopefully it
will solve our problem (it looks _very_ promising, from some initial data
crunching we ran), and is very easy to implement.

We plan to send an email one month after the user's last activity, and then
delete the documents (just the documents, not the account, just in case) a
month after that.

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sushrutbidwai
I would add a pay per use plan. once user runs out of 300 marks he can buy X
for Y usd. also a small one time payment to permanantly store user data.

~~~
StavrosK
That's a good idea, and very easily implemented. We will pursue it, thank you!

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dennyabraham
I didn't realize all pages were cached. I figured they were indexed and either
discarded or tossed into storage

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StavrosK
Nope, all the pages get cached and you can optionally publish them to get a
persistent URL to which you can link from anywhere.

