

Show HN: 7courses - The easy to use online recipe manager. - templaedhel
http://7courses.com/

======
Roedou
I applaud you for tackling this niche, but $120/year seems a high price. For
example: this is the same price as a 50Gb plan on Dropbox.

There are some features that could make this really valuable - such as
automatic parsing/importing of recipes from other sources, or a tablet app
with syncing for offline - but if these (or any other value-adding features)
do exist, you really need to expose them on the front page.

Have you looked at <http://onetsp.com/> ? Their freemium model allows a
limited number of recipes. Pro version is $5/year.

~~~
templaedhel
Oh wow, I had never seen onetsp before. They compete almost directly with me.
I agree on the price, and currently brainstorming different ways to monetize.

~~~
alexhaefner
Well what are your ideas? I cook a lot, and I know others who had ideas for
similar services. I can't really see myself paying money for an advanced note
taking app. I think you'll have to add more value to be able to justify me
paying for this.

It looks great. Very well done.

------
steve8918
Sorry to be blunt but $10/month is totally unworkable.

Who is your target audience? It's house-spouses. If both spouses work (like I
used to) they would more generally go out to eat, so there's no reason to
spend $10/month on something that they would use infrequently. Netflix is
$8/month.

If you're a house-spouse, like me, you are notoriously cheap. There is no way
I would pay $10/month for something that I currently bookmark on
allrecipes.com. Or print out on a sheet of paper.

I just checked out onetsp.com and that's probably more like it, 150 recipes
for free and $5/yr. That's more the price range that someone would be looking
for, rather than $120/yr.

------
tjic
I spend several hours in the kitchen most nights, making my own asian
dumplings, ravioli, bread, vinegar, etc.

I dehydrate food, have 100+ spices on hand, and more.

I clicked the link, saw the price, and immediately clicked "back".

I have no idea what the features are, or how wonderful it is.

UTTERLY unrealistic pricing.

Offer it free, suck me in, and THEN push me to upgrade, and you might get
$2/mo or $5/mo from me.

...but putting a high price like that right up front means that you don't even
get my email address.

~~~
jeffclark
Old marketing pro once told me: "it's really easy to lower your prices, but
fucking impossible to raise them".

I agree with tjic's sentiment, especially the "free trial" bit.

EXCEPT, that maybe instead of charging $10, make it APPEAR as if your
intention is to charge $10/month "but signup now to get it for $x FOR LIFE".

~~~
dmix
> "it's really easy to lower your prices, but fucking impossible to raise
> them"

I think this is true for big companies with huge customer bases.

But when you're just launching a startup, it's not that risky to experiment.

------
mstefanko
I don't think this is near ready for $10/month subscriptions. I agree with
adityakothadiya with having some sort of freemium approach. Walking through
how I took this at first, I clicked your link and was a second away from
sending it to my girlfriend. That's huge, but then I saw the price and
immediately closed the window. I just can't imagine anyone paying that much,
more than streaming accounts on netflix/hulu. For an online recipe box.
Especially when similar free and cheaper solutions are available. Even looking
at something like <http://onetsp.com/account/signup> which i'd say is
definitely direct competition, it's free to use, and $5 a year for pro
account. Why do you value yours so much higher than this, as much as I like
dead simple, you currently have zero defensive edge against competition. Even
using evernote, you can do something similar and have a very searchable
database of recipe's. Until you have something that puts you clearly above the
rest, I'd be extremely careful of missing out on early adopters. First 100
signups shouldn't get a month free, they should get a year free, seriously.

~~~
templaedhel
Hey, thanks for the feedback, the price will change or be removed for sure. In
the meantime, I'd be happy to set you or your girlfriend up with a free
account, but can't find your email in your profile. Email me, mine is in my
profile, if you're interested.

------
templaedhel
I am happy to announce to relaunch of 7courses.com!

I launched almost exactly a year ago, as a sort of weekend project
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087598>

I've sort of let it stagnate, and gotten a few users, mentioned on smashing
magizine, but nothing major. However, I use the app quite a lot, and was
getting tired of some small bugs, so decided to recode and relaunch.

The app is 100% JavaScript, node js backend and thick js frontend (jammy.js,
model.js, etc). It is a mobile web app, looks great on iPad and iPhone too.

I got enough feedback that I decided to charge for it, but for a day the first
100 signups will get a month free!

The price is very tentative, and I'm open to any and all suggestions. Also, if
you would like to give accounts away on a blog etc, contact me, I'd be happy
to set something up.

Any and all feedback is welcome, thanks a ton!

~~~
alexchamberlain
I'm not convinced charging is the correct way of monetising this. Could you
not target advertising instead?

~~~
jbrennan
I'm glad to see some people have the balls to actually charge for a service
instead of peppering me with ads. You get what you pay for. If I were looking
to use a service like this, I'd be much happier investing in my time in one I
pay for rather than a free one.

~~~
Karunamon
>You get what you pay for.

GMail cost me $0, and it's probably the best webmail service/interface out
there right now.

>If I were looking to use a service like this, I'd be much happier investing
in my time in one I pay for rather than a free one.

Why would the amount of cash you throw at something impact how you invest your
time in it? I love Evernote, but me throwing a few bucks a year at it isn't
going to change how I already use it.

~~~
jbrennan
> GMail cost me $0, and it's probably the best webmail service/interface out
> there right now.

Yes, you get a good product, but you also get ads. Your information isn't
really entirely private. Some people are totally fine with that, and that's
OK. But if you don't want a service to do that, usually that means you pay
them money. Nothing is free.

> Why would the amount of cash you throw at something impact how you invest
> your time in it? I love Evernote, but me throwing a few bucks a year at it
> isn't going to change how I already use it.

I mean that in the sense in order to really use a product like this, I've got
to spend time putting recipes into it. The very basic (and not perfect) theory
is: if this site is making money from me directly, it's less likely to shut
down or want to sell out. I take comfort in that but I know there are counter-
examples.

------
bdfh42
$10 a month buys a lot of good recipe books.

------
nathos
I like YumTab [<http://yumtab.com/>] for grabbing & storing recipes from other
sites.

The importer/parser is quite smart, and while the planner & shopping list
manager are pretty basic, they get the job done.

------
eurleif
How is this better than just storing recipes in Evernote? (One thing I thought
it might do is automatically scale recipes up or down, but it looks like it
doesn't do that.)

~~~
bhousel
Exactly my thoughts.. My wife and I are moving all our recipes into a shared
Evernote premium account, and it's really fast and easy to use, and performs
decent OCR on whatever we scan.

I can't think of any way that we could improve on this setup, except maybe to
sell all our cookbooks and buy an iPad just for the kitchen.

------
gallamine
How does your service compare with another service,
<http://www.pepperplate.com/>? My wife and I are trying to settle on a
product. We're considering that or just using Evernote, but Pepperplate lets
you scrape from many different recipe sites.

------
revorad
This looks nice. You might want to add a time-limited free trial.

I wouldn't take the pricing advice on HN too seriously because even if you
charged $10 lifetime for something, you will find someone complaining that
it's too much. "If only it were $3.33, I would totally buy it for the whole
family."

Don't decide based on what the competitors are charging. Because the answer to
that is ZERO.

Decide based on what kind of business you want to be in. If you want to scale
it to the moon and make it up on volume, then sure give it away for free or
cheap and work on optimising for premium upgrades or advertising.

But if you are looking to make money from the get go, then don't even think of
charging less than $10/month or you will end up losing money.

------
dreadsword
Very good looking site! Does it function as a locker for recipes from other
sites (allrecipes, etc?), or do you need to manually input everything?

I agree with alexchamberlain - I'm not sure there's enough value to be found
in any recipe service to justify $120/year, when multiple options exist.

I hate to fallback on advertising as a business model, though. I'd say offer
free accounts to pull in early adopters while you use their feedback to refine
your product and keep working on building out features.

------
adityakothadiya
I'm not sure charging $10/month is the right way of monetizing this service.
It's useful, but you have to think is it valuable and critical enough to pay
$10/month? For "consumers", you should target somewhere around $3-$5/month.
That too, not all consumers will pay this - so you have to have some Freemium
approach. I feel current version of service should be Free and do Ad-based
revenue. And then you add more advanced features based on user feedback, and
then make that Premium plan with no Advertising.

------
durbin
Everybody is saying $10 is too high of a price point and that was my initial
reaction too. However, I think its great that you're looking to build a
product and charge people for it. Its easy to coast by thinking that you're
doing something right when you have lots of free users. By charging out of the
gate, you'll be able to learn how to get money from people a lot more quickly
than a company going the freemium route, keep trying.

------
vailripper
Love the UI. What I would really love though is a site in which I can give a
URL to a recipe I like, and it parses everything for me into a common format.
Having to manually enter ingredients / directions when much of the time I'd
just like to pull the recipe from somewhere else is going to be too much work.
Something like that I would pay for, a simple recipe manager, not so much.

~~~
templaedhel
A parsing bookmarklet is on the horizon, I've begun on the backend for it
already.

------
dp1234
Recipage (<http://www.recipage.com/>) is a free solution that has a decent
amount of overlap though it is more focused on bloggers being able to publish
their recipes.

------
miles_matthias
Great mobile version and it looks great added to my iPhone home screen. I was
about to sign up but then I saw it was $10/mo. Sorry, I'll stick to using
Evernote for my recipes.

------
snowcandy
I'm not even sure if I would pay $10/year, let along $10/month.

------
prawn
Why not try Pinboard-style escalating pricing instead that starts dirt cheap
(yearly or lifetime) and grows with the userbase?

------
lwhi
Slightly off topic, but I wish there was an XML format specifically designed
for recipes.

~~~
scottkrager
<http://microformats.org/wiki/recipe-formats>

------
alexchamberlain
When you edit the recipe,its done WYSIWYG style. Which js library did you use?

~~~
templaedhel
It's handwritten code on top of jquery UI. There are a bunch of form elements
(text inputs) that have been styled, and you can drag and drop them to
rearrange.

------
warmfuzzykitten
What distinguishes this HN post - added by the company in question - from
spam?

------
d3x
Good job, I am working on a similar tool. There are lots of free great recipe
managers on the web. What is the main differentiating factor that makes this
worth 10 a month?

~~~
templaedhel
The important thing that differentiates this is that it is solely a
replacement for a recipe box or other strategy for storing recipes. Most other
recipe managers are tacking added on to recipe discovery tools. 7courses
allows for sharing recipes, but is 100% focused on making it dead simple to
manage your recipes.

And we have a kick ass mobile web app.

