Ask HN: Flaregun - Manage domains and SSL certificates - Would you pay for this?

[ollierattue]

Hey everyone,

I am really keen to build a for sale web app, having developed a couple of successful free products. Instead of going for the build it and they will come approach, I have decided to get some early validation of my idea. Yesterday I asked HN about Silo (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556658) a SSL certificate management web app. A HN user pointed out that there may be major trust hurdles to overcome with this product, but he expressed interest in the expiry notification concept. This got me thinking.

A little while ago two major, yet easily avoidable problems occurred, resulting in downtime, lost revenue, stress, and unhappy clients:

1. I get a phone call from a client who tells me their websites and email is down. I run some checks and find out that the domain name had expired. My client registered and manages the domain name so this downtime is his fault. However my client is not particularly happy when I tell him this. He was of the opinion that I looked after his domain and hosting so should of spotted and warned him about this. Clearly doing this manually for all my clients is impractical. The domain went into 'holding' and an extortionate release fee had to be paid, which I bore the cost of as a gesture of good will. With lots of clients and domains registered by myself and clients this is likely to happen again.

2. I get a phone call from a client who tells me that some of his visitors have reported that their e-commerce website is coming up as insecure in their browsers. I check the website and see that the SSL certificate has expired. I spend the next few hours getting a new certificate re-issued using my clients Enom account. My client is annoyed as his customers have complained and he suspects he has lost revenue as a result.

Step in Flaregun. Flaregun (http://getflaregun.com) is targeted at people who look after domains on behalf of their clients. You enter all your domains and it looks up the whois information. A notification email is sent out a week before the domain expires to ensure you have time to warn your client and renew the domain. Similarly SSL certificates are added and expiry notifications are sent out a week before to ensure you have enough time to renew your certificate.

I have put up a holding page (http://getflaregun.com) with price plans. I am reaching out to the HN community to see how the idea is received and whether you would be willing to pay for this product. Thanks for your time.

[hopeless]

I like it (caveat: I'm not the target market)

It's simple and doesn't require much interaction from the user. Ideally, I would set the notifications at 1month and 1week as some clients may have purchase orders to be written etc (or for small businesses, on holiday for example over Christmas)

Only other thought: this doesn't have to be a webapp. It could function just as well as a cross-platform desktop app or browser extension. Sure, that's a one-off payment model but I would worry that a user wouldn't be signing into Flaregun that often so the likelihood of maintaining a monthly subscription would be low. I would just worry that if that aren't logging in often, the perceived value goes down.

Best of luck!

[ollierattue]

Hey Hopeless, thanks for taking the time to comment.

Your notification periods sound spot on. Early (1 month) to allow purchase order & client holidays + potentially clients wanting to let a domain lapse. The system could then do another whois lookup expiry check before sending out the 1 week left reminder.

I take your point about the monthly subscription model. Thinking of the monthly services I pay for I tend to log in pretty regularly. As you say Flaregun isn't really like this. You would dump your domains into it when you first sign up, then login every so often to add a new domain (10-30 seconds). So payment options are:

1. Keep it monthly and perhaps reduce price.

2. Charge a one off fee (local program) - it could even be some kind of spreadsheet addon. However I favour a webapp as it is the easiest incarnation to iterate and further develop. Also a local program would need to always be running to display / send the notifications.

3. Yearly subscription. Domains are yearly so this would kind of tie in. Getting into a customers head if you thought Flaregun solved a problem for you, you probably would be fairly loyal - i.e. it's not a try it, see if I like and if I get on with it I will keep it kind of product. You either want it or you don't. But I always feel an upfront yearly cost increases the barrier to subscription. I wonder if a yearly cost with a 100% money back guarantee if not satisfied, could be the answer.

Any other thoughts / ideas appreciated.

Cheers,

[there]

i do web/email hosting and am in a similar situation with my customer domains. however, i'm an opensrs reseller, so i usually do the actual domain registration and renewal for my customers as their registrar. if customers don't want to transfer their domains to me, i tell them they're responsible for renewing them (which i use as a selling point for why they should transfer them to me).

for any domains/certs that require manual renewal on my part, my billing system (plug: http://corduroysite.com/) is set to invoice the customers for these a month or two in advance because it's entered as a yearly recurring service. if they pay the invoice, i see it and do the renewal manually (or at least verify that the domain is set to auto-renew with opensrs). if they don't pay the invoice, the domain doesn't get renewed. this is actually beneficial because sometimes customers want to let some domains go, so they will contact me and tell me to let them expire before the auto-renew date comes up.

anyway, as for your product, your free package seems like it would be useful for your target market (web developers managing a few domains). however, anyone with more than 15 domains would probably have a billing system or domain reseller account that manages all of this for them. for a large company with hundreds of domains needing your more expensive packages, i can't really see them manually importing and deleting lists of domains as customers come and go, especially since there is no integration with their billing system.

my point being, the product may get a lot of free accounts but not many paid accounts. perhaps you should look into integration with established billing/invoicing systems?

[ollierattue]

Hey, thanks for the detailed comment on how you handle this situation. It is so helpful to get such thoughtful feedback and has really got me thinking critically about this product.

Out of interest do you develop websites on behalf on your clients or is it just web/email hosting?

I am trying to figure out the core market for Flaregun. I think it is really targeted at web design agencies which handle a clients complete web presence.

The last company I worked at, a small web agency, was a reseller (Enom) and like you would buy domains on behalf of clients. However a lot of our clients wanted to buy the domains themselves so they had full ownership. So we had a situation where we owned and renewed 70 odd domains and then the rest (100+) were owned by 40 odd clients (some legacy) across as many registrars. Tracking all these domains was just not possible. Some were bound to slip.

"i tell them they're responsible for renewing them (which i use as a selling point for why they should transfer them to me)" - this is a completely reasonable policy which completely covers you. However perhaps this "I told you so" attitude wouldn't work in all situations. I guess it depends on the relationship with the client. If it is just hosting then yeah you can take that stance. However clients paid my old company to handle their web presence, sometimes on high traffic websites were downtime was not acceptable. In this instance their expectation was a little higher, and preventing potential problems like this was assumed to be a responsibility of the web agency.

Your thoughts on the free vs paid for plans are interesting. A few of my thoughts:

1. Perhaps it would make sense to get rid of the corporate plan (as you say anyone with this many domains would already have a well sorted billing / renewal system in place)

2. Make the agency plan unlimited (chances are they wouldn't have more than 500 est domains).

3. I see the professional account as a freelancer. Maybe 30 domains is too high in this case.

4. The free account could be removed and a 30 day free trial added to the paid accounts. I guess you either want this or not. The free account doesn't really serve as a sales device like it would on other apps. Also your use of Flaregun doesn't expand over time (like it does with a app like Basecamp). You start with x number of domains to manage, so you jump in at a price point (plan) which allows that number of domains.

I have been thinking about building billing (domain and hosting) into the product, but I guess most people already have an invoicing system setup and wouldn't want another systems. Integration with existing systems would be great but is time consuming and makes the web app a lot more complex.

Cheers,

[PonyGumbo]

I'd definitely pay for this, but the pricing feels off. I have about 70 domains right now, and I just can't see spending $12/month for an automatic renewal reminder.

[ollierattue]

Hey, that's really great to hear you would pay. It's great idea validation. Would love you to answer a few quick questions:

- Could you suggest a monthly price you would be happy to pay?

- Would you be willing to pay a yearly (saving over the monthly cost) fee? If so what would you be happy paying?

Thanks for your time.

[PonyGumbo]

Sure, no problem. I'd honestly be more inclined to pay on a quarterly basis, and I think my threshold for something like this is probably around $4/month. If it were me, I'd eliminate the free plan (or take it down to one domain). Also, at $4/month, I wouldn't care whether it was ad-supported, so that's another potential revenue stream.

[ollierattue]

Thanks for this. Hadn't actually considered a quarterly charge. That's a good idea. Low monthly charges start to get difficult with per transaction standard fees (like paypal).

One more quick question. Are you acting as an individual i.e. freelancer, or agency? I don't think an agency would mind paying $12/month if they had a few hundred domains, so perhaps the domain limits are off and it would be better like this:

Professional - $5/month - 100 domains

Agency - $12/month - 500 domains

Max - $30/month - 2000 domains (can't see much demand for this plan)

I agree the free plan doesn't seem to make much sense. A better option would be to give a free trial period on the paid plans e.g. 7 days.

[PonyGumbo]

Agreed. I'm a one-man shop.

[ollierattue]

Thanks for all your input - new pricing plans up at http://getflaregun.com/plans

Plans feels more suitable now. Getting rid of the free account feels the right move. If anyone is interested they should be willing to 'gamble' $5. I can't see many free -> paid upgrades happening so it is probably easiest to cut it out (less support, coding etc).

If you click on signup there is a form to get a one time email when Flaregun launches (it is currently in development).

Cheers,