[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,