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Your product looks really nice. If you are not profitable yet maybe you should consider increasing the price, you're much cheaper than the competition based on

by volent 10y ago

Your product looks really nice. If you are not profitable yet maybe you should consider increasing the price, you're much cheaper than the competition based on your pricing page.

sleepychu 10y ago
+1 should be at least 3 times the price, IMO. No.1 lesson from my dad was "think of a number, then double it, they'll always pay more"
23andwalnut 10y ago
I raised prices for about 6 months. Total revenue and number of purchases went down dramatically during that time. I think I need to target a different type of user to charge more, just not entirely sure how to reach those users.
- zbruhnke 10y ago
  I'd argue that the problem is not that you raised the prices but the user increments are set way too low ... to appeal to teams I'd have the cheapest plan be at least $99/year maybe the full $149 but also give them 5 users by default - then allow a monthly option which effectively forces people to pay a 10-15% ish premium over the yearly option. Then make a plan for say up to 15 or 25 users that is substantially more expensive and finally the unlimited user plan could be even higher. Because you're able to do so much inside of one application I could easily see companies paying $1k+ for parts of this on a yearly basis especially when they had 20+ users of something like the task management tool. Personally I'd also suggest modularizing your different pieces (so you can just buy the project management or just buy the invoicing etc.) As teams get larger they may want to do more or do less inside of one application, you dont want to have people feel like they're paying for things they don't need if they arent using them. Just my $.02 I know all this takes a lot of work, but the product looks great, I hope you can figure it all out! Best of Luck!
- jermaustin1 10y ago
  There are a lot of ways to raise your price while still making it look like a steal. You should definitely split test all of this and pretty much everything you do, honestly. Price Anchoring: Use a giant unreasonable number for the unlimited plan with 1 month of phone support, 12 month same business day email support, you will install it for them, all the ACH and Credit Card processing through you (and you through stripe), etc. A HUGE list of features to go along with the $574 price tag. Then drastically back off of that pricing for the 10-25 team ($249), 5-10 ($199), 2-5 ($149) and solo ($99) plans. You need to also reduce the features, support windows, contact method as you drop the price, not just the number of users. Additional Revenue Streams: 1) Include your own payment processor and accept payments on their behalf, if you have 500 customers doing a few thousand each month on average, you processing fee will drop a lot. Always default to ACH via Stripe (0.8% fee, and a 25 cent transfer) bill the customer at 2% + $0.30 and you are making money. 2) Annual licensing. Don't give updates away unless it is a bug fix. And make sure to always be improving your product (which it sounds like you are) 3) Cloud hosted. As someone else said take the annual price divided by 12 and add a premium to it (25% or so). Also push updates to this channel regularly and add a few extra premium add-ons to it (like the a custom domain name self hosted has but for an extra $5/mo) 4) Plugins to various other solutions for $49/piece. I know this is probably a side project, but you could turn this into a viable small business with an additional 1-2 developers. Conclusion: I'm totally buying it before you potentially take any of my advice ;)
  - hobs 10y ago
    Whether or not you decide to follow this advice, its pretty good and based on a lot of lessons learned from dumb things others have done.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    You should write up a blog post with these and more stuff that works. Lots of OSS developers get overloaded on the projects and dont make money. A useful tool can use tactics like you describe to avoid that. I never thought of the payment processing trick. Good idea.
    - 10y ago
- pornel 10y ago
  Try selling for 10 times as much. Look how much Jira costs: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=host-on-your-server https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=host-on-... For corporations this isn't big money. They'll worry more about ongoing cost of a sysadmin looking after the installation.
  - priitmaxx 10y ago
    I totally agree. Either go for self hosted and charge a lot more, or cheap affordable hosted option.
- reubenswartz 10y ago
  Agree with the comments about raising price. And your notion that you may be targeting the wrong people. You're already much less expensive than BaseCamp (let alone enterprise tools). But for people who want a hosted version, that won't matter. BaseCamp isn't that expensive. Think of it as being like BaseCamp, but with complete control of the data. It's a feature, and to some people, it should be worth more. Your pricing plan of 1/2/Unlimited Users doesn't really capture this. The plan before unlimited should probably have 100 users or more. That way, larger customers who want to control their data can pay the right price (and feel more comfortable doing it, as @patio11 has pointed out-- you can be too cheap for people to buy). Good luck!

by volent 10y ago

Your product looks really nice. If you are not profitable yet maybe you should consider increasing the price, you're much cheaper than the competition based on your pricing page.

sleepychu 10y ago

+1 should be at least 3 times the price, IMO. No.1 lesson from my dad was "think of a number, then double it, they'll always pay more"

23andwalnut 10y ago

I raised prices for about 6 months. Total revenue and number of purchases went down dramatically during that time. I think I need to target a different type of user to charge more, just not entirely sure how to reach those users.

zbruhnke 10y ago
I'd argue that the problem is not that you raised the prices but the user increments are set way too low ... to appeal to teams I'd have the cheapest plan be at least $99/year maybe the full $149 but also give them 5 users by default - then allow a monthly option which effectively forces people to pay a 10-15% ish premium over the yearly option. Then make a plan for say up to 15 or 25 users that is substantially more expensive and finally the unlimited user plan could be even higher. Because you're able to do so much inside of one application I could easily see companies paying $1k+ for parts of this on a yearly basis especially when they had 20+ users of something like the task management tool. Personally I'd also suggest modularizing your different pieces (so you can just buy the project management or just buy the invoicing etc.) As teams get larger they may want to do more or do less inside of one application, you dont want to have people feel like they're paying for things they don't need if they arent using them. Just my $.02 I know all this takes a lot of work, but the product looks great, I hope you can figure it all out! Best of Luck!
jermaustin1 10y ago
There are a lot of ways to raise your price while still making it look like a steal. You should definitely split test all of this and pretty much everything you do, honestly. Price Anchoring: Use a giant unreasonable number for the unlimited plan with 1 month of phone support, 12 month same business day email support, you will install it for them, all the ACH and Credit Card processing through you (and you through stripe), etc. A HUGE list of features to go along with the $574 price tag. Then drastically back off of that pricing for the 10-25 team ($249), 5-10 ($199), 2-5 ($149) and solo ($99) plans. You need to also reduce the features, support windows, contact method as you drop the price, not just the number of users. Additional Revenue Streams: 1) Include your own payment processor and accept payments on their behalf, if you have 500 customers doing a few thousand each month on average, you processing fee will drop a lot. Always default to ACH via Stripe (0.8% fee, and a 25 cent transfer) bill the customer at 2% + $0.30 and you are making money. 2) Annual licensing. Don't give updates away unless it is a bug fix. And make sure to always be improving your product (which it sounds like you are) 3) Cloud hosted. As someone else said take the annual price divided by 12 and add a premium to it (25% or so). Also push updates to this channel regularly and add a few extra premium add-ons to it (like the a custom domain name self hosted has but for an extra $5/mo) 4) Plugins to various other solutions for $49/piece. I know this is probably a side project, but you could turn this into a viable small business with an additional 1-2 developers. Conclusion: I'm totally buying it before you potentially take any of my advice ;)
- hobs 10y ago
  Whether or not you decide to follow this advice, its pretty good and based on a lot of lessons learned from dumb things others have done.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  You should write up a blog post with these and more stuff that works. Lots of OSS developers get overloaded on the projects and dont make money. A useful tool can use tactics like you describe to avoid that. I never thought of the payment processing trick. Good idea.
  - 10y ago
pornel 10y ago
Try selling for 10 times as much. Look how much Jira costs: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=host-on-your-server https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=host-on-... For corporations this isn't big money. They'll worry more about ongoing cost of a sysadmin looking after the installation.
- priitmaxx 10y ago
  I totally agree. Either go for self hosted and charge a lot more, or cheap affordable hosted option.
reubenswartz 10y ago
Agree with the comments about raising price. And your notion that you may be targeting the wrong people. You're already much less expensive than BaseCamp (let alone enterprise tools). But for people who want a hosted version, that won't matter. BaseCamp isn't that expensive. Think of it as being like BaseCamp, but with complete control of the data. It's a feature, and to some people, it should be worth more. Your pricing plan of 1/2/Unlimited Users doesn't really capture this. The plan before unlimited should probably have 100 users or more. That way, larger customers who want to control their data can pay the right price (and feel more comfortable doing it, as @patio11 has pointed out-- you can be too cheap for people to buy). Good luck!