21–30 of 56 posts
I recently met Neil at a conference in SC, and I've known and done prototyping work for Hiten for a little over a year. I was also one of the original alpha testers for this product. I am 100% confident the pricing decision was founded in hard data and experience. One of their other products, CrazyEgg, aimed for and delivered incredibly heavy functionality. However, it resulted in disproportionate load on their peopl…
This isn't true, it suffices to at one point make a single decision that on average will make you $200 per month for the tool to have paid itself for ever thereafter. Or more likely, keep generating revenue. For many businesses (like retailers) this could entail improving the funnel by just a few conversions per month.
If you don't have a business with the potential to improve cashflow (or other business value) by $200+ per month from analytics, of course you're not within their target group.
The lesson KISSmetrics obviously have learned and are appliying is that if you are bootstrapping your company or project, you must identify and be brave enough to stay within a very specific customer demographic in order to succeed.
If you look at one of their main competitors (MixPanel), the prices they decided are actually half. Here is the MixPanel page for comparison: http://mixpanel.com/pricing/ And here is KissMetrics: https://www.kissmetrics.com/signup Moreover, with service such as KISSMetrics the support load will be quite high (since there will be all kinds of integration issues, why don't numbers match with GA, etc). Anything below $1…
I yield to no one in empathizing with cash-strapped startups. However, the broader economy has many companies which do business on the Internet and which have actual money. Not "whine about the difference between $10/mo and $20/mo at their particular size" money, which the CrazyEgg team has probably seen more than I care to speculate. Not even "replace low-paying day job with sales" money. I'm talking "Have (teams of) full-time employees whose only job is to do analytics" money and "Pay $150 a day for the hotel room that their high-priced consultant stays at without batting an eye" money.
It makes a lot of sense, especially for a product which you're going to sell in a high touch fashion, to say "We're going to focus on that sort of customer. Folks who perceive $20 or so of value a month from their funnel optimization are welcome to check out our competitors."
The startup market is a relatively small market, the market for corporate websites, retailers, etc. is much bigger and for that audience the pricing seems perfectly viable.
But it seems strange that they are completely ignoring the small business market altogether. I'm pretty sure it would be easier to sell 15x$10 subscriptions rather than 1 $149 subscription, which is probably going to involve at least a phone call if not a face-to-face meeting.
I recently met Neil at a conference in SC, and I've known and done prototyping work for Hiten for a little over a year. I was also one of the original alpha testers for this product. I am 100% confident the pricing decision was founded in hard data and experience. One of their other products, CrazyEgg, aimed for and delivered incredibly heavy functionality. However, it resulted in disproportionate load on their peopl…
I can see the support point of view: reduce the number of customers = reduced support burden. But a "Starter" plan could come with lower (or no) support commitments. There could also be disproportionately less events (i.e., $10 for 20k events vs $149 for 1m) "a product so obviously unintended for you" I guess this is the part which really annoyed me: until the pricing was announced, KISSmetrics was exactly what I nee…
I wrote a piece of OSS A/B testing software, which is rather similar to funnel analysis in application, what type of businesses it appeals to, and who will likely be implementing it. My software is used in some small places and some big places. It has not been my experience that big places tend to take up more of my time than small places.
Integration is hard. Educating users is hard. ("You seem to be under the impression that A/B testing software includes genetic algorithms to write copy for you. This is not in scope for this project, but you're welcome to patch it in...") These don't get less hard just because you're firing the API less than Employee #4602 at BigCorp. (If the user can do 100 API accesses without incident they can probably do a hundred million. Scaling is just a matter of getting the architecture right, and you don't have to redo that on a per-user basis.) Also, BigCorp has internal engineering resources that they will likely fall back on prior to emailing you, where one-man shops might be more inclined to mail you first.
I recently met Neil at a conference in SC, and I've known and done prototyping work for Hiten for a little over a year. I was also one of the original alpha testers for this product. I am 100% confident the pricing decision was founded in hard data and experience. One of their other products, CrazyEgg, aimed for and delivered incredibly heavy functionality. However, it resulted in disproportionate load on their peopl…
I can see the support point of view: reduce the number of customers = reduced support burden. But a "Starter" plan could come with lower (or no) support commitments. There could also be disproportionately less events (i.e., $10 for 20k events vs $149 for 1m) "a product so obviously unintended for you" I guess this is the part which really annoyed me: until the pricing was announced, KISSmetrics was exactly what I nee…
If you look at one of their main competitors (MixPanel), the prices they decided are actually half. Here is the MixPanel page for comparison: http://mixpanel.com/pricing/ And here is KissMetrics: https://www.kissmetrics.com/signup Moreover, with service such as KISSMetrics the support load will be quite high (since there will be all kinds of integration issues, why don't numbers match with GA, etc). Anything below $1…
We also do offer a "free" type plan: http://mixpanel.com/free