From Free to Freemium!
Posted by Richard White Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:11:00 GMT
I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
You want the good news, eh? I admire your spirit …
I’ve decided to take this operation to the next level, that means incorporation, hiring other developers, and big plans for the future which will be revealed very shortly.
Now for the bad news, SlimTimer is going from a free to a freemium service.
That means that, like many other web 2.0 properties, there will continue to be a free version of SlimTimer but there will also be premium (paid) service levels.
Monetizing SlimTimer was always on the table but my original desire was to make SlimTimer’s premium tiers be completely feature based and not usage based. What I’ve found out is that there’s a reason almost all freemium services have some sort of usage component in addition to providing extra features: people don’t pay for features because they generally don’t know if what they’re worth it without using them first. Makes sense.
What I do I mean mean by usage component? Here are some popular web 2.0 tools and the usage components that figure into their freemium tiers.
- Basecamp: # of active projects, file storage
- Blinksale: # of invoices per month
- Wufoo: # of forms, reports, fields and entries (phew!)
- Tick: # of open projects
In addition, to a usage component there are a couple features that are pretty standard on premium plans like email support and SSL (on the higher premium tiers) which SlimTimer will copy. In addition, if we roll out integrations with other applications, such as QuickBooks, that may be something that becomes a premium only feature.
So you want to know what’s going to be limited in the free version of SlimTimer?
The truth is, I don’t know…. yet.
The obvious answer would seem to be that the number of active tasks should be limited.
Unfortunately in SlimTimer the number of active tasks currently reflects more about how people use SlimTimer (using many fine grained tasks vs using a task per project) rather than how much they get out of SlimTimer. Also, it has the undesirable side effect of incentivizing the use of as few tasks as necessary rather than being very granular. I find that to be unfortunate since I’ve always been pretty happy with SlimTimer being fairly agnostic about how you use tasks and letting you determine a system that works best for you.
Some other ideas (not saying they’re good ones) would be to limit the number of…- Reports Run
- Hours logged per week
- Entries created per day
- Tags
- Shared Tasks
- ???
... but I’m not really happy with any of those ideas.
I even considered letting people name their own monthly price for what they felt SlimTimer was worth to them. I still really like that idea, but it’s creates a lot of overhead in the billing department and I’ve been told that I’m being too idealistic.
I’m going to go back to my lab and ruminate on this, but I’m really curious to see what you guys (and gals) think about this. How you feel about the switch tofreemium? Any ideas on what should be limited in the free version? Any other ideas that I may have missed? What’s fair?
I’m going to follow the comments here closely and post again next week with a resolution, hopefully! Also, stay tuned for the long awaited and oft mentioned “next big thing” post, which I’ve actually already written. :)
Thanks for being SlimTimer users. It’s about to get a lot more fun!
Read our update on this issue
I think your conversion to freenium is a necessary step and makes a lot of sense.
Honestly, I hate the idea of limiting the number of tasks or daily entries on the free version. It would undermine much of the usefulness in my case.
The task sharing seems like a reasonable deluxe feature, as does exporting to quickbooks or another app. Perhaps a more robust enterprise-style application would work too. I know my workplace was interested in some features to make it easier to integrate a whole group, such as: better/easier management of users into groups, a task hierarchy, user reporting using user groups, etc.
I would hate to see the beauty of the app lost in complexity, but it might be a great option for an organization that needs “a little more”.
Good luck!
A couple thoughts…
- I agree with you that limiting tasks or entries would undermine some of the usefulness. The hard part for me is that that’s kind of the point in a freemium app: you have to cripple the free version a bit.
- I’m very averse to limiting task sharing since it’s how we get most of our regular users, otherwise it would make a good candidate.
- There are others considerations I didn’t mention like how I have to be conscious of how any new ‘enterprisey’ features fit into our long range plans.
Thanks for the feedback
I hate the idea that your thinking of limiting something that was free and is free now. I know, you said from the start that you were planning a commercial version. But in my view, this should never be done by cutting back presents.
There are a lot of additional features that are really worth paying for. The one feature I’d be glad to pay for would be an invoicing capability . This also makes sense from the point of business logic: you’d start charging where users start making money using your product.
You could build such invoicing functionality on your own. Or might do so in a partnership: perhaps blinksale would share revenue if you turn slimtimer customers into paying audience?
Currently, there are times when high server loads bring down the site and the client cannot communicate with the database. That is a scary thing when you are using the timer to record your billable hours and such. A premium service should run on a separate server that is carefully monitored for traffic, so that if you are doing VIT (very important timekeeping) you can pay for the highest level of reliability. Don’t limit the free client by numbers—just make it clear that it shouldn’t be used for mission critical work since high traffic levels could make it unreliable during peak hours.
Thank for all your hard work! I will certainly sign up for the premium service when it comes out!
I also understand your decision and have nothing against it. I would be willing to pay for a commercial SlimTimer account, but I have to agree with Arne – it’s really bad to give something for free and then take it away. I have just about 135h billed so far (I found ST just two months ago), but it (ST) has already become an indispensable tool in my daily work. I would hate it to find out some day that I can no longer keep as many tasks open at a time (I do a few projects monthly and have a few tasks for each) or that I can’t run several reports a month. I often use the reporting feature just to see how much I earned a particular day :) – I usually run the Audit report at the end of work day.
So, if it’s at all possible, try to think of an expansion in the premium version rather than crippling the current free version.
I would agree with sam that task sharing might go premium, but only because I don’t use it – so don’t listen to me. ;)
Cripple-ware is the way of the future, e.g. Vista… so maybe:
Free: – Up to 20 tasks – Unlimited hours – Up to 50 tags – Default reports
Premium: – Unlimited tasks, tags – Shared tasks – Skinnable timers etc. – API – Custom reports / graphs
Kids grow up and stop beig cute. Free apps grow up and stop being free. I’ve always felt Slimtimer was too good to be completely free and won’t hesitate to go for the paid version, assuming the rates are something like Basecamp. Peter’s suggestion looks sensible from both your’s and a user’s viewpoint. We’re keen to see what comes of your plans for invoicing – we were about to go Blinksale/Freshbooks but held off specifically to wait for Slimtimer’s next move.
Richard, I much prefer your approach rather than commercial everywhere. I’d like to comment about the price ranges: propose a cheap yearly cheap price plan for people with modest incomes. I am happy to pay for my pro flickr account because I can pay for a year, but even I love Highrise, I can’t afford the cheapest plan …
I will be interested to see what you do and how it works for you. I am in the midst of development right now for an app I hope to release, and my biggest decision is what to release free and what to hold so that I can charge.
Personally, I think free Web 2.0 is hurting the quality of the apps we are going to get. If you stand to make money from it, you are going to spend a lot more time developing it, testing it, and supporting it, but this movement for everything to be free is really restricting what we get. So I’m all for Web 2.0 apps charging money. Yes, it means you will lose customers, but you will also gain customers as the app improves.
Myself, I barely use any of the features of slimtimer, and as usual, as time has gone by using it, I use even less. But, I don’t think I’m your target niche. That is what you need to identify and then figure out what features they are using, and how much its worth to them.
I would recommend you not worry about which customers you lose, but stay focused on the #1 goal of SlimTimer in the first place. Stay true to that, and in the end you should be happy with the outcome.
By the way, you’ve done a great job with the application, and I hope mine comes out as well as yours (not a competitive product, btw).
Thanks for all the well thought out comments. Keep them coming.
- I agree that it would have been better to charge for things in the beginning than to try and pull back now. Unfortunately theres not much I can do about that now except to promise you that I’ll make every effort to make this as painless as possible. Thus we’re looking into things such as possibly doing a grace period for existing users and providing a data export should you decide to leave.
- I’m really biting my tongue about releasing any more info about what’s next even though I’m dying to (I’m not because I don’t want it to overshadow this discussion), but I will say that we are building invoicing, in a way.
So far I’ve been using Slimtimer alone and haven’t explored the task-sharing / multi-user features, but I like the idea of user-count as a usage limiter. It’s very scalable because generally (to a degree) the size of a team is directly proportional to the budget available for awesome services like this one. Like the other commenters, I would hate to see currently free features become premium-only. Honestly I find this application so useful that if I logged in one day to see a message like “Upgrade to a paid account so I can spend more time working on Slimtimer!”, I wouldn’t even need anything added to convince me. Maybe a different skin for the timer to make me feel special. Or if I could enter an hourly rate for each task and the report page showed the sum earned (neat for a quick check on how much I earned today to boost morale) followed by a “You made $xx.xx, could you spare a $5 donation?”, I’d click that probably every time I got paid. As far as price, I’d personally like to see it around $8/mo for a single user. What do the rest of you think?
I think up to $10 per month. I won’t pay more, I’d rather write my own time tracker. ;P Unfortunately (?), we live in various economies. $10/mo would be more than I pay for hosting, btw. ;P
Grace period sounds cool, what I would like to get is some free period to look around the premium version (two weeks or so), so I can decide whether I want to switch to that.
I’ve been using Slimtimer for a long time now, ever since it began. I think it’s a really nice app, and worth paying for.
All of the people saying “I don’t want to have to be able to limit my number of tasks” could always pay for it. I think it’s a service at least as worth of my money as Flickr or Safari bookstore.
I think I’d pay about 30/yr …but I’d probably pay 5/month …so I think it would b best if you charged me monthly! :D
To limit the features that free users already have would be terrible. Look at any other ‘freemium’ apps that went from completely free to have additional paid subscription plans. Not a single one of them cut back on the features for an existing user.
They’d always say things like ‘beta users get free accounts for life’ or they’d add more features that would then become paid for, leaving what the user signed up for intact.
I strongly urge you (both for my selfish reasons, and for your success) not to limit, or eliminated existing features/capabilities for current users.
Anon: Can you cite some specific sites that went through a similar transition, I’d love to have some perspective. Most of the apps I know were smart enough to establish the free/paid line from day 1.
CrazyEgg, GotVoice, Joyent Connector and, of course, don’t forget… Google Apps to name a few for sure. I think also Zoho, GrandCentral, Tick, Devshop and ClickTale are in one phase or another of transition while retaining either a free-for-life plan for beta users or not charging for existing features.
It’s been a while, but also I’m pretty sure that the basic functions that initially came with all 37signals apps were never taken away when pay plans were introduced. And as I said, added features/expanded capabilities only became available in pay versions.
I think that you need to be sure that you position Slimtimer in the revenue stream of its users. I’m using it for all of my billing-my life’s blood-because of the flexible interface and fit with Bubbles. However, it is an effort to get timesheets into my invoicing system.
If it was integrated with Freshbooks, I wouldn’t be able to afford not to pay $10-14 per month. Then there’s Quickbooks, blinksale, etc. Freshbooks has a timer, but I can’t keep it at the ready on my desktop. But Freshbooks is now getting $15 a month from me (and I’m painfully slow to pay for anything on the Internet).
Get into the revenue stream. —Brian
Of course, I don’t like the idea of limiting the free version of ST, but I too understand the need to make a buck :-)
Here’s how it would impact me: by day, I’m a corporate embedded systems engineer. I use ST at work just to track my time spent on particular tasks. It helps keep me honest about how much work I’m actually doing (versus time spent on distractions). There’s an incentive to ignore distractions when ST is constantly reminding me that my budget is shrinking each second. I find myself being more productive when ST is up and running. However, I don’t use reports and invoicing at my day job. I only need to track the time I spent on tasks. If the free version of ST became crippled in this respect (i.e., limited # of tasks), I’d probably quit using it, in all honesty. I’d probably go back to toggl.
However, by night, I do a little moonlighting. This is where I might be willing to pay a small fee to use reporting and invoicing/billing features and task-sharing features. I’d probably be willing to pay in the ballpark of $5-$10/mo. If it got higher than that, I’d probably just get my Timex stopwatch and a sheet of ledger paper and track my time that way, and use the Google spreadsheet app to generate reports and invoices.
I hope this is helpful. I hope to keep using ST; it’s a neat product.
These sorts of user stories are invaluable when we’re navigating this type of decision so keep them coming. We’ll probably have a definite answer next week but we’re leaning away from arbitrary element limits (like tasks).
Aloha Richard,
WOW! I’m Thrilled you’re looking at monetizing such a fantastic product. When I 1st heard about SlimTimer from my VA, I could NOT believe my eyes that this was 100% FREE! you created an AMAzING product & the world of small business owners thank you for it.
That being said… as a Business Coach, I scratched my head in wonderment, asking, HOW does Richard White MAKE $$?
I thought… hmmmm – maybe he has a premium version of ST that people can upgrade to and get additional features that same them time, make them more money and thereby are HAPPY to pay for such a service.
or… is he using ST to build his list – and then offer them other things to help their business operate, etc. (which i still leave on the table for you as an idea of “what to do w/ the free version of ST) b/c while I’m willing to pay a small monthly or annual fee to continue using it myself (and slightly more for all my VA’s to use) as a business coach I think the more you can let the world know “who Richard White is” and wonder what OTHER uber cool products does he create – the less you’ll have to invest in $$$ tres expensive marketing / advertising.
makin sense? at any rate – luv that you’re posing the question to your raving fans – and BEST of luck as you roll out the big launch – I’ll certainly be “OPTing in” and checking you out – er – i mean your BLOG out in the days and weeks that follow (chuckle, grin, wink, wink, say no more.)
I think most people use ST for serious usage, so I think strategy of first N days or even better N logged hours full functionality free , and than mandatory payment would work quite well. If price is right, people would just gladly pay, since they would like to keep history of logged data.
Damn how I missed this I do not know.
I always believe the early adopters believe some sort of play on price on products like SlimTimer. Yes it rocks but a monthly fee can be painful for many.
Solution??? At least for early adopters a one time fee for lifetime service . This is not so uncommon. Many people would rather pay $250 once than $15 per month.
Paying for specific features such as something that suits each person would work for most I believe. I have been desperate for not Quickbooks integration but Quicken integration which seems extremely simple as it is just a five line text file. I sent you the file months back.
@douglas Looks like I’m not one of them. I would rather pay $180 (12 x $15) than $250 up front. ;)
Ah, looks like I misunderstood you after all. Yes, $250 for a lifetime is a different matter. Although that might still be too much for one time for me, I think I would end up coding a time tracker myself. :)
I read a suggestion about keeping premium version hosted in a dedicated server and separated from the free version. I kinda agree, but, I think it would be good to also create a local system (to place in tray, like the bubbles actually) but with a new feature: data storage in the local machine. So, when connected to the Internet, the system integrates the data automatically. I believe we can’t wait back for the internet connection to restart counting worktime. Another suggestion mentioned before I liked is the graph reports, and about the prices and limits: it’s up to you Mr. White! For sure you will find the best schema. Good luck and congratulations for the good job!
Not completely satisfied with the launching style of this product. Could be a scam
Not completely satisfied with such kind of launching.