What happened to free?
Pricing models are tough. Unfortunately, we are programmers / engineers, not marketing people (Mike has a marketing degree but we do not let him do any of that).
When we started we did not have a clue about how many people were even going to use the service. Also, we thought the inconvenience of only having a 5 minute session for free, plus having to wait in line, would be enough 'encouragement' for professionals to opt for the premium service.
Boy were we wrong.
Of the 17,637 users that have registered with our service, 708 have either purchased some credits or subscribed to the service - right at 4%. While the 5% paid number in a freemium model is a great percentage traditionally, it only works if you have thousands upon thousands of users (ie Flickr, etc) - it does not work in an industry such as the web design area with a focused audience where we see hundreds of users per day.
Originally, we felt that the credit model would be good because it was a feature that would let you buy the time you needed and nothing more. But as time has gone on we saw that most everyone ended up confused about it. We also have found that credits alone would not get us to a point of covering costs. Even now, our subscription base is funding the growth and development of the business - we decided this is the group we should focus on serving.
With our new subscription model we feel like we were covering our mistake of basing our model off of high traffic and it is a pricing model that everyone understands.
As we stand today we are covering most costs, but none of the 3 partners has taken a dollar in pay for the thousands of hours we have put into the business. We would like to change this at some point. The way to do this is to have a profitable business.
We are releasing our new platform and web site and along with it we are no longer offering free sessions. The decision was hard. Some people will be mad. We do not want to lose customers but in the end we would like to make enough money to support ourselves and to continue to grow the platform.
Ken, Mike and Tony
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Comments
new look is nice, not free - not so nice
New look of the site is really nice. But it's unfortunate that you dont offer the free service anymore, but completely understandable. The service was always good and the response time to any support requests was better then I get at most paid-for services.
I'd just like to add my 2 cents for a pay as you go option as well. As far as it being confusing, i'd just suggest letting people buy a set number of minutes. Maybe you can offer an increasing discount the more minutes you buy in one batch. That would certainly be better for me since i only used the service sporadically. It would be a much better deal for me if i could just buy say 150 minutes and know they are there when i need them and when i run out I can just buy more.
you guy's have been really good as far as customer support and communicating with your user base. So no hard feelings at all about your changes. But i do hope you offer a pay as you go option. I'll tell you right now if you do i'd order a chunk of minutes right now.
Good luck with the new business model. Hope it works out.
Would it be possible to offer
Would it be possible to offer a weekly plan, or even a day pass kind of thing? Something between the monthly fee and the pay-as-you-go option? My biggest issue with a monthly subscription is that I usually only need a browser testing environment on a very sporadic basis, and even then only for a short while. There have been times where a few months have gone by and I've not needed to use your site for testing, which wouldn't make much sense to pay a monthly fee for.
Anyways, you guys have a great site and I'll check with my boss to see if we can't set up something, perhaps one of your plans that a few of us could use here where I work.
Thanks & good luck!
As the saying goes, never say
As the saying goes, never say never. However, at this time, we do not plan on offering a day pass or anything like that. Ken covered our reasoning in his response below, so I won't duplicate that. I will echo what he said though about our subscriptions. You can sign up and immediately cancel. You will still have access for the whole month, but there will be no recurring charge. We require no commitments, you can start and stop as often as you like.
I know this isn't what you are asking for, but it is as close as we can offer at this point. We do appreciate your comments and hope that you understand our position as well.
Best regards,
Mike
Thank You
I just wanted to say thank you for having the free option for as long as you did. It really helped me during my programming classes. Also, the customer service was excellent and even unexpected. I think the pay-as-you-go plan is a great idea from the previous comments especially for those who don't use your services often enough. Hopefully I'll be able to use your services again once I'm able to afford a little more. Good luck to you guys.
Ditto
I certainly don't begrudge you guys wanting to make a profit, I think it's an excellent service, which I'd be more than happy to pay for. In fact, I did buy credits before the new pricing plans came into effect, but I would echo the comments of those who would prefer to be able buy a certain amount of minutes, as opposed to a monthly subscription. With the current pricing plans, I'm sorry to say I will not be signing up once my current credits are used up, but I will keep checking your site for a pay-as-you-go plan.
Best of luck.
Need a pricing option other than monthly subscription
The fact that you only offer monthly subscriptions means that you are only going to appeal to customers that feel they will use your service every month or ones who think they have no alternative.
I'm in the category of one who really has no idea how often I'm going to use your service and am very unsure that I'm going to need it every month and thus don't have an interest in making an advance commitment to paying every month. I'd much rather use a pay-as-you-go option where I pay by the session or pay by the minute. The more I use, the more I pay. The less I use, the less I pay. That seems in line with your goals of making what you charge be proportional to your costs too. I'm even fine if you make the pay-as-you-go option more expensive than the basic option for someone who uses 150 minutes (the basic limit). For example, the basic option is ~13 cents/min at the max usage. If you made the pay-as-you-go be four times as expensive at 50 cents per minute with a 4 min minimum, I'd be fine with that. Then, I could do a quick test for a couple bucks or a longer test for more without feeling like I had to make a long term commitment.
I'd also be interested in an option where I could pre-buy a bunch of minutes and then just use those over the next year. I just can't predict that I want to use your service significantly every month so I feel uncomfortable paying for it every month.
Agreed
A pay as you go option would definitely be more appealing than a monthly subscription for us. We can't commit to a $20/month option when we have no idea how much we will need the service in any given month.
Why aren't we providing a 'pay as you go' option?
I posted this over in the 'How does the new pricing model work?' blog post as a reply to requests for a 'pay per drink' option - I wanted to post it here to give insight as to why we are not offering one.
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We liked the idea too (of a pay per drink plan) when we started CrossBrowserTesting - it seemed the right thing to do. It did not, however, work well. There was continually a lot of confusion with our user base over the 'pay as you use it' plan. It made our pricing page for initial users very confusing, as we had a ton of different ways to buy - you had to 'study' our pricing plan - it was hard to understand. And, ultimately, it did not generate enough revenues to make for a viable business - the volume was just not there.
Our solution is to break out of the 'normal' $50/month minimal subscription plan of our competitors and put in place a plan that casual users can afford. It is restricted in time, but it should enable intermittent use at a reasonable cost. If you look at our competitors, their solution for intermittent use is a day pass... at $25/day. We feel our $20 month plan is a better option, particularly since you can cancel and restart it as you need it. It will also provide the funding necessary to maintain and grow the business.
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We have discussed the pay per drink option again internally, and we are not going to offer one. The price per minute that we would have to offer it at to make it profitable would be too high, and we would be criticized for that rate (ie $25 per hour of use - I would be critical of us for that rate also...). The volume is not there to make a 'pay per drink' work at a lower price.
Some other reasons we are not going to offer it:
- Even at a high rate, it would not add significantly to our bottom line.
- 'Pay as you drink' is much harder to manage. If a person has a bad connection on a subscription, they just retry (yes, we have our hiccups). If a person has a bad connection on a session they are paying individually for, they were 'cheated' and demand (and deserve!) a refund. This does make the 'pay per drink' more labor intensive, however. This is time taken away from doing other things, such as developing new capability.
- Developing the payment system for the pay per drink model would also take our focus away from providing new capability for our subscribers. Ultimately, they are the users that are funding our operation and investment in time on the business, and they are the people that we are going to put our energies into serving by releasing new functionality.
- We believe our low price for a monthly subscription (40% of our competitors offerings) is very aggressive and should enable use of our system without breaking the budget.
I am a big believer in 'the customer is always right', but we cannot be all things to all people - we are small enough that it is important for us to focus. We are going to focus on our subscribers. Even if you might not agree with our decision, hopefully explaining it helps you to understand where we are coming from and the reasoning behind our choice.
Thanks,
Ken Hamric
Thank you for everything
I find your service invaluable and am more than willing to dish out what I feel is a minute amount of money each month in order to test my sites. Thanks for being free for so long and best of luck to you with making great profits in the future, understandably to better your service and offer more and more to paid users.
Regards,
~MBohanon
cool
I am really glad to hear how much you use the site.
I think we are really in a good spot to increase the services now. We can concentrate on keeping the subscription people happy and coming up with new things that will help even more with testing.