Pricing strategy

After a lot of feedback from you, discussions, and thinking, we need to update our strategy, our positioning and our pricing.

Basically we have 2 categories of person:

  • personal/organization - they want it as simple as possible with full support
  • hobbyists - they like to tinker, hack around, discover and pay less

Personal / Organization - free software as a service - support

We obviously bring more value here.

So the new strategy is to focus in offering free software as a service. It includes application support for users and organizations. The price will be market price / 2. Divided by 2 because we don’t have 20 people working 24/7 to support.
And more than anything, we’ll calculate price based on users. For RocketChat it will be billed 4€/active user/month for instance. (We’ll see where it doesn’t make sense and find a good pricing).

The landing page already reflect this change, and the new website also

Hobbyists - Container as a Service

For hobbyists, we have an idea also. We want to continue to involve you even more, and offer you the best we can. But we have to first focus on having a stable income to then bring you the best!
So the idea is to keep hosting you first, at the price you signed of course. If you need application support, you can open a ticket with us, it is 25€/ticket and we’ll love to help you.
(If it is related to our infrastructure, we solve it for free like we always did of course!)
And then little by little, we’ll give you access to our GitLab instance, and you’ll have control there to update your application, deploy any kind of thing!
The idea is to build a container hosting service, and you’ll be billed 25€/container/year with 1vCPU and 512MB RAM (it is market price / 2 :slight_smile: ).
You’ll always be able to buy us time to help you develop your project. (25€/h it is market price /4 :slight_smile: )

Community support / Tutorials

For everybody, there will be community support on the forum like now. When we have free time, we’ll try to help anybody, and write articles/tutorials to get going.

Conversation

So here is the beginning of the conversation. Everything that is said is open for discussion.
We make this service because we are passionate about free software, and there is not such a thing around. So we build it for us and for you!
@unteem joined the adventure beginning of August and @SoDi is in the process of joining. (We have maybe one more person). And now, we want to take it to the next step, make an income from it, so we don’t need to worry any more about salary. Then we can dedicate our time to make IndieHosters awesome, and make Internet great again!

And like always, every bits we write is free software, so anybody in the world can replicate the service \o/

2 « J'aime »

How is/will this market price be calculated ?How often shall it be updated ? :wink:

I think we have to find a sweet price that is both good for the end user and for us. In the case of github we could say 4€/month. I don’t see the need for updating this price.

And then we make it lean, if anything happen, we can of course change our strategy, and make it higher/lower…