[steveridout]

Thanks for sharing this!

I checked out your pricing plans and the way you differentiate plans based on visitors / day jumped out at me since it goes against advice I read recently from the UserVoice team. They used to price based on number of users who can vote but (in their own words)...

"This was a huge failure. It created what I call a success penalty: the more successful you were in activating your users to give you feedback the more expensive the product became. On some level this made sense but since no one knew how to estimate this future usage it just created uncertainty about committing to a product without knowing the future cost of it. It was especially problematic because we were often working with young companies who didn’t know or were very optimistic about their future active user levels (and equally optimistic about what % of them would engage on UserVoice and give them feedback). It put us in the awkward position of tempering a customer’s enthusiasm about their use of our product (aka “There’s no way you’ll have 300K people on your site in 60 days time”). When we removed the usage limits, which were designed to drive upgrades, we actually saw that upgrades increased 33%!"

Link: http://500.co/the-data-behind-purchasing-behavior-at-uservoi...

[benediktdeicke]

Thanks for the feedback! I agree that the pricing isn't perfect, yet.

I'm currently segmenting by visitors/day as it seems to be the only way to separate bands into the different plans based on their popularity and success. It's also directly bound to the costs on my side (more traffic -> more server resources).

I'm happy to hear suggestions on how to make sure a band making tons of money doesn't end up on the smallest plan, as well as costs for infrastructure not bankrupting me. :)

[goblin89]

> I'm happy to hear suggestions on how to make sure a band making tons of money doesn't end up on the smallest plan

I can’t help thinking that coarsely segregating customers into plans and overly streamlining the sign-up process might not be the optimal choice in your case. Why not just drive everyone to contact sales directly like, for example, landing page for Ellington CMS does[0]?

You can still market a cheap newcomer plan with low specs, limited support and only basic customizability, strongly implying that it’s the choice for young poor bands. Anyone above that is probably better off working with you directly so that you can estimate the costs and price the solution for them individually. Your highest plan is €199/month—would you bill Metallica that much if they come?

[0] http://www.ellingtoncms.com/cms/, a CMS originally built for small-ish newspapers, also where Django framework was born.

[benediktdeicke]

That's a good idea. I'll experiment with that. Thanks!

I'd probably bill Metallica a lot more than that… ;)

[gabemart]

I would suggest you add "average" somewhere to the "x users per day" messaging, seeing as in your FAQ you make clear you won't charge extra or take a site down for a one-off spike in traffic.