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Chargify New Pricing

chargify.com

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Re: Chargify New Pricing

#51

Post by [deleted] »

davidu wrote: post #42
jacquesm wrote: post #17

> we do need to migrate everyone to the new pricing You can't change your pricing upwards for existing customers, ever. You can change your price to anything you want for new customers. You can decrease your prices for anybody at any point in time. Something like chargify is the basis for the business models of other parties, if you made a deal in the past you have to honor it, so that your customers can honor the de…

Agreed. First, it's crazy that Chargify is not talking about this here and responding. (Update: they are responding quickly via Twitter) Second, when will companies understand and learn that you simply CAN NOT do this. Hell, how can any board member let a company do this? We just started looking at Chargify for all OpenDNS enterprise users (doing many $mm/year in transactions) but we thought their pricing might not s…

[deleted]

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#52

Post by adamhowell »

I feel like I'm missing something, because going by these pricing charts -- http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup -- it seems like if you're a Chargify customer, "freemium" is no longer possible.

We (http://mocksup.com) happily use Spreedly and only send customers to them when they're upgrading to a paid account. Can you not do this with Chargify? And if you can, what do they count as a "free" user?

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#54

Post by dangrossman »

Deja vu. This is exactly what Recurly did to its users a few months ago. It was a bad move, with negative effects for their company that were serious and lasting enough that they had to backpedal with new pricing a few months later.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#55

Post by proee »

carbocation wrote: post #49
proee wrote: post #46

Bypass the SAAS model altogether and check out http://www.opengateway.net One-time fee for the script and you get all the power of chargify on your own host.

Am not well versed in this, but wouldn't the onus be on you to be PCI compliant then?

it depends on your sales volume. If you're a small starup you can do self-certification. Once your volume picks up you can go to the next step.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#56

Post by jacquesm »

olefoo wrote: post #48
jacquesm wrote: post #17

> we do need to migrate everyone to the new pricing You can't change your pricing upwards for existing customers, ever. You can change your price to anything you want for new customers. You can decrease your prices for anybody at any point in time. Something like chargify is the basis for the business models of other parties, if you made a deal in the past you have to honor it, so that your customers can honor the de…

> You can't change your pricing upwards for existing customers, ever. That assumption needs to be questioned. There are times when it's appropriate to raise your prices for certain goods and services. In fact, there are times when you must raise your prices if your business is to survive.

But this is not one of those times. What you do is you adjust your businessmodel so your new model takes in to account grandfathering in the old customers. Who over time will fade away so the problem will take care of itself.

We're not talking about a price hike that is caused by an increase in cost of raw materials or such. And even those usually don't radically cause your business model to shift, they will just cause an adjustment of a few percent or pennies to accommodate the underlying shift.

For instance, I have a very good deal with moniker for my domains, if they underlying price changes I pay for that. This is logical because moniker has to pay it too, so they pass the cost on 1:1. It's not like they told me 'first 50 domains are free' and then suddenly turned around and started charging me $100 / month.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#57

Post by zefhous »

I fail to see how this could possibly be a good business decision for them.

Seems pretty plain to me that they need to be going for the low end of the market — new startups with 0-100 customers — rather than the high end.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#58

Post by cglee »

markbao wrote: post #43

Wow, really? Chargify just lost its position as the best choice for subscription management. Extremely glad we didn't launch yet with Chargify... Here are some Chargify alternatives that we are looking at: Recurly, http://recurly.com/pricing/ at 200 transactions and 500 users $29/m - Spreedly, http://spreedly.com/info/pricing/ at $19/m + $0.20/transaction or 2% per transaction if less - CheddarGetter, https://cheddar…

Last time I looked, Spreedly's API and functionality wasn't even in the same ballpark as Chargify's. I've worked on integration projects with both, and Chargify is much better and more configurable. Spreedly may have improved, it's been a while.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#59

Post by carbocation »

patio11 wrote: post #53

Guys, if this upsets you, you are not in the target market. (Much love, but the real world spends real money on revenue drivers.)

If bootstrapped young startups aren't in Chargify's target market, then I'd argue that "the target market" was poorly chosen.

Why might the low-budget territory (with costs from $0-$30/month) be useful for Chargify to cover? Not because you'll make much money from that territory. In fact, you might, on balance, lose money on the people who remain in that group. However, everyone who starts there won't stay there, because some will ultimately become your multi-thousand-subscription core users a year from now. In other words, it might act as a "loss leader." This pricing structure, given the pricing structure of the competition, risks diminishing the wellspring of new users for Chargify.

Restated, my (testable) hypothesis is that (a) if you have similar competitors, and (b) you make yourself unpalatable to your low-tier users, then you will see reduced growth in your high-tier users. It looks like Chargify is willing to test that hypothesis.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#60

Post by vaksel »

jacquesm wrote: post #17

> we do need to migrate everyone to the new pricing You can't change your pricing upwards for existing customers, ever. You can change your price to anything you want for new customers. You can decrease your prices for anybody at any point in time. Something like chargify is the basis for the business models of other parties, if you made a deal in the past you have to honor it, so that your customers can honor the de…

agreed. it raises uncertainty...if they raise the prices now...what's stopping them from raising them again in the future.
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