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Chargify New Pricing

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Re: Chargify New Pricing

#61

Post by cglee »

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.)

It's not so much as the money that's upsetting, as much as the broken trust when prices are adjusted upwards so dramatically. For example, our monthly prices will go from 0 to $99/month. You can say that may be a good thing, forcing us to focus on customer acquisition. But the point is that a service we budgeted X dollars for suddenly, dramatically increased. Of course $1200/yr is not life threatening. However, the trust is gone (or, at least it's dissolving quickly). As I wrote in my email to Chargify, if they're experiencing increasing costs, let us (their customers) know and be sincere - we are their fans! I WANT to pay them, because they have a quality product. But right now, it looks like a money grab after locking in developers. That part is upsetting.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#62

Post by markbao »

cglee wrote: post #58
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.

That is what I found when I last looked at Spreedly as well. Good opportunity for them to beef up their API to attract defectors.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#63

Post by gdevore »

schammy wrote: post #40

Did they learn nothing from the Recurly debacle a few months back? I don't think their pricing is bad but they need a starter plan that's less than $99/month. Also, why are both Chargify and Recurly doing "bucket" plans with such high starting price points? Why not charge based on actual usage? If you have 500 paying customers you can justify $99/month no problem, but most people are going to take a while to build up…

The problem with charging for actual usage is that most of Chargify's support costs are probably incurred while their customers are setting things up. And that is when they don't have any users. Once you get chargify set up you don't have to touch it too much.

Regardless though, this was a bad way to handle the price increase.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#64

Post by detst »

It's clear that none of these services have quite figured out how to best price their service but it seems that CheddarGetter is the only reasonably priced option.

Why is it that they seem to be perceived as also-rans? With Chargify, you'd have to bring in $60,000/yr before they would begin to be reasonably priced. Completely unreasonable for a bootstrapper seeing if they have something that will stick.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#65

Post by podman »

Their justification on Twitter seems to be that they needed to get rid of their free tier. That makes some sense, but that doesn't really explain why they double the price for their lowest tier and increased the pricing on their other tiers as well. It's unfortunate that they're increasing their price without adding any extra value to the product.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#66

Post by Goosey »

matt1 wrote: post #50

Question, since this is getting a lot of discussion right now and it's relevant for anyone this impacts: If you run a subscription-based web app and you determine that you need to increase your prices, what's the best way to do it? Grandfathering existing customers obviously makes sense, but what if that's not an option? What if you need to charge them more to survive?

Make the old customers part of a 'legacy' tier which allows them to continue to pay the same and receive the same, but don't allow new customers to join that. Put new customers in the 'fancy shmancy' tier and allow old customers to migrate there (with price increase) for whatever new features you are adding.

It's still going to be a bitter pill for the old customers, but it IS better than saying "Sorry, you gotsa pay more now! Suckers!"

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#67

Post by jacquesm »

MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #22
wheels wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's worse is that if you're already using them, you basically have no choice in the matter since the alternative is trying to get all of your customers to sign up again, which is basically a non-starter. Note that they also doubled prices for their first tier of paid customers from $600 to $1200.

Well, technically you have all the customer data in your gateway's info manager (like Authorize.net's CIM), but it would still be a real bitch to take that and do anything useful with it. Plus, the clock is ticking on your 30 days to get it migrated to your new setup.

CC, EXP and CVC as well ?

Without those you won't be doing much in terms of migration.

Other than contacting the customer, figure you'll lose 75% or more of your business that way.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#68

Post by MicahWedemeyer »

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.)

Pretty sure you're dead wrong here. I am in the target market, and I'll still make money using Chargify, but it took me two years to get where I am. Starting from zero today, Chargify would make absolutely no sense to even consider.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#69

Post by raerae7133 »

dangrossman wrote: post #54

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.

At Recurly, we did roll out new pricing in May of this year, and immediately received a lot of feedback from our users.

We then modified our pricing plans again in July to reflect their feedback, and grandfathered existing users in, if they so preferred.

Dan, I wish I could work with you to change your opinion of Recurly. I'd love to talk to you about your experiences and see what we can do to make it right.

Rachel, Recurly Support

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