It’s now a little over 2 months that we started charging our customers and, like we expected, we learnt a lot. The first thing that we learnt (but we hoped that too) is that we’re building a legit business. Without going much into details, we made enough revenues to cover our expenses during this period (and even more!), which gives a lot of new perspectives. However, the solution we started 2 months ago isn’t good enough, for several reasons.
People don’t like Paypal
This was actually the most frequent feedback : how can I avoid using Paypal to pay you guys? Today, we’re happy to introduce a new payment system, so you can directly use your credit card on our site. We use the Braintree for the payment, as well as ActiveMerchant and it’s been a breeze to integrate, once we got accepted into the various programs :). Of course, Paypal’s fans, can still use the Express Checkout feature.
Monthly payments, rather than upfront fees
We found out that it wasn’t really easy to deal with “packages”. Some of our customers weren’t feeling very confident to pay for our services upfront. At the same time, it was a requirement by our payment gateway that we only take payments for services that were delivered. So we changed this. You will now be billed monthly. We keep track of what you’ve consumed, and, once a month, we send the bill.
Our pricing is competitive… on high packages
… But not so much on small packages. As a matter of facts, we barely sold our $50 package. So we decided to drop down the pricing a lot.
When $50 used to get you 25,000 credits, you will now get 100,000 credits (4 times as much). When $300 used to get you 300,000 credits, you will now get 900,000 (3 times as much), and $1500 will get you 6.2M credits, vs. 3M previously. We also introduced a simulator so you have an idea of how much we will charge you. Your Account’s page also shows your current consumption and an estimate of the price by the end of the month.
We really want to thank all the customers who trusted us from the beginning and this new pricing is retro-active, which means that if you bought packages in the past, we granted you the extra credits to match this new pricing.
I also want to remind all of you that we introduced many features in the past weeks which can allow you to monitor your credits consumption more closely. Feel free to review them, and give us more feedback. We’re here to learn and help from you. For example, did you know that we send you your credits balance with every PubSubHubbub notification?
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