[danielzarick]

Three quick thoughts for you which should hopefully help:

1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.)

2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly).

3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or something that feels very high for you. Not sure what features it should have, but there is definitely something you can provide businesses that would be worth that amount. And they'll be fantastic, low-fuss customers.

Good luck!

[gingerlime]

I would generally agree about raising prices, but not in this case. At least not until you get better traction and reputation. Pingdom is probably the market leader in this space(?), and you will probably need to beat them on pricing initially (even though there's so many things to do better than they do...).

Agree about yearly plans though. Makes more sense for businesses.

I know it's usually not about features, but I'll definitely look at adding SMS or more specific alert integrations (PagerDuty). Building for developers with webhooks and slack is great, but I would imagine not enough.

Love the design and everything else (also Apex the OS tool is great, even though I only looked at the code but didn't actually use it). I can imagine getting traction is tough in such a busy space. Best of luck!

[tjholowaychuk]

Agreed, PagerDuty and SMS are on the list.

SMS is the only annoying one really since it's freakishly expensive for what you get (~6$ / 1000 SMS or so), most people seem to have SMS credits that you purchase which just seems annoying to me. I'm thinking about adding SMS to the larger plans though without any weird credits.

Thanks!

[gingerlime]

Yes, pricing with SMS is tricky.

Just my 2 cents, but with Apex being dev-friendly and all, maybe you can just ask for a twilio API key and just fire the message across?

[tjholowaychuk]

True true!

I've actually been using IFTTT for my PagerDuty replacement since I can't afford it hahaha, unless I'm missing something they don't seem to charge for phone calls etc

[tjholowaychuk]

Thanks!

They're definitely a bit on the low side, it still seems hard since most programmers despite making crazy sums of money often complain about spending even $10/m on something haha.

I'll think about raising the prices a bit once I have some exclusive features. I thought having a free plan would be good on the marketing front, and maybe it will be, but I definitely need some features to differentiate the plans

[danielzarick]

Haha yeah, sounds familiar. That's actually one of the primary reasons to raise them! Unfortunately, your biggest support costs will be from unreasonable people on the cheapest plans. So by raising prices you often weed out the people who complain, but make up for it in the extra dollars from all the silent people who love the product.

The "exclusive features" thing is awesome in theory, but unlikely to matter to most customers. Having a simple, well-designed, straight-forward product can be worth a few extra bucks. Extra features will be gravy in the future (or more stuff for the higher plans).

Free plans are tough, because adding one without a good strategy usually ends up being a distraction and more server/support/etc cost than good for upgrades. Most people will just sign up for a paid plan or a free plan and stay there, unless you have a really great strategy for getting them to upgrade. With that said, I worked at Twilio and we made sure to give a bunch of free credit because we knew getting devs to try it for fun or personal projects would often translate to them convincing their employer to use us for something that made us a lot of money. The difference here is that the true customer was businesses that paid a lot of money.

(If you can't tell, I really enjoy this stuff haha. Hope it's not annoying.)

[tjholowaychuk]

Hahaha nope not annoying at all, I've always been on the backend sort of missing out on details regarding sales and marketing so it's interesting to get a better feel for this stuff.

I'll have to keep an eye on the analytics for free plans. I'm not tracking conversions very well right now, most seem to choose a paid plan right away (if ever).