Quarterly plans as opposed to monthly?
I have reached the plans & pricing stage with twitMate and am considering quarterly plans. I know monthly & yearly plans are standard so I am uneasy about moving away from these, but…
twitMate, is somewhere between a service and a SaaS because, for each user, there is a significant amount of work at first but after that it basically runs itself.
I want to avoid an extra 'setup cost' as this will slow the build and I am aiming to keep things simple for users too.
The setup work…
I estimate about 5 hours work per account to setup. It's a Twitter management service and I will manually hand-write text, find images and select hashtags for Tweets as well as set up API access for the user's Twitter account. After that our tweet and follower engines will take care of the rest.
The cost of my time…
Price-wise, I'd like to cover the cost of my time in the first payment so something in the region of $200 / €175 / £150. However, this feels too expensive per month and the market confirms that there is some competition that costs about half this (although some that is more expensive too).
The plans…
So I am thinking of quarterly and annual pricing - off the top of my head something in the region $400 / €350 / £300 a quarter and $800 / €700 / £600 a year?
What do you think?
*The setup work…
I estimate about 5 hours work per account to setup. It's a Twitter management service and I will manually hand-write text, find images and select hashtags for Tweets as well as set up API access for the user's Twitter account. After that our tweet and follower engines will take care of the rest.*
Side question: is this part manual for now because you haven't figured out how to automate it? Or is the task definitely something that can't be automated?
I have the exact same approach for Metronome - I manually craft each customer's podcast landing page when they sign up. But in my case, it's only because I'm focused on product-market fit; once that's done I'm definitely automating the onboarding steps for Metronome..
I'm interested to understand your point of view, because it's something I can definitely learn from!
@FaizMetronome Most of the manual work involves things that can't be automated (or not well anyway!) - writing text for tweets, sourcing images to match the text and choosing relevant hashtags all need to be done manually if they are going to be high quality. I could try to automate something but it would probably just be rubbish and I think the selling point will be that it's a high quality service.
I am going to automate the steps to get information from the user about their business/website/organisation but the 5 hours doesn't take that into account.
Setting up Twitter API access for the user's account may be possible to automate but I think at this stage it's easier if I just do it by hand. This part is not that time consuming.
With another project of mine Downtime Monkey I automated absolutely everything and I still get customer support emails from Pro users - mostly just wanting to check in on support I think.
Quarterly plans are something I've been thinking about as well for theLIFEBOARD but not for the same reasons. In my case I think people will find its value after commiting and use it for a couple of months.
In your case, I think it's worth doing it to justify the higher price and maybe you can mention in a FAQ some other reasons for not having a monthly plan.
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