Lessons about pricing

Spanning Sync, the calendar syncing tool I mentioned a while back, came out of beta today and announced they were going to start charging for their product. I think they’ve done a fantastic job developing a helpful little app and deserve to make some money. What’s interesting though is where they decided to set their fees and the instant reaction from their 18,000 current users.

Under the new pricing $25 gets you a one year account and $65 a permanent license. There is a 15 day free trial but no basic free option with a chance to upgrade later. The prices seem high to me. A one off payment of $20-25 is closer to what I was expecting, and what I would have paid.

So, first interesting thing is that they choose such high fees (keep in mind Apple iLife, with a whole host of complex applications, is only $79). Second interesting thing is the noise that their upset users have made. Check the comments here and here for the almost universal objection to the fees.

From a comment on the Unofficial Apple Weblog: “$65 once or $25 for a yearly subscription is well North of ridiculous. There’s no way I’ll even consider buying this product. The developer simply hasn’t built that kind of value into it.”

And from the Spanning Sync blog: “I have already uninstalled Spanning Sync. As lots of ppl say, price is outrageous. And I do think Apple will release some kind of Google sync service with Leopard, seeing that the collaboration between the two is becoming increasingly evident. Plus, what are the guarantees that the service won’t stop working next week?”

It will be interesting to see the response from Spanning Sync over the next couple of days. Maybe they will lower the price and try to win back the upset users. Or maybe they will conclude that these users will never pay them and decide to target a different kind of user who sees more value in the product.

As we get closer to launching our web application (still a few months away I’m afraid) we are beginning to think about how much value we will be creating for different users. In our case the value won’t be even. We expect many people will get great value from a free service but some will want to pay for premium features to access even more value.

One thing we will need to be very aware of, no matter what our pricing strategy, is the expectations of our users. If there is a lesson to be learned from the Spanning Sync example it is that you can never under deliver and over price in the eyes of your customers if you want them to stick around.

Lunchtime watching

If you’re trawling YouTube at lunchtime today looking for a laugh, I think this is what you’re looking for…

Apparently “mom used to work for a dating service in the 80s. She kept a bunch of tapes and I edited clips of all the best losers.”

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Consume

File under: Completely irrelevant

I have a friend who uploads photos of almost everything he eats to flickr. Sometimes looking at his stream makes me feel hungry and sometimes it doesn’t. Today it made me feel sick!

The cult of Mac is officially out of control

So, some guy snaps a picture of Steve Jobs at his kids soccer game, possibly speaking on an iPhone. He uploads the photo to flickr and it gets 90,000 views in 3 days! Madness.

I’d like to live here, for a little while

I’ve always respected people who take things to extremes. For example a friend of mine in London decorated his flat in a modernist hunting lodge theme – white floors, ceilings and walls + taxidermy + ultra modernist clear plastic furniture. It’s not the most traditionally inviting house but it is absolutely spectacular.

The Reversible Destiny Lofts by Arakawa and Madeline Gins (via Caterina) look like another living concept taken to the extreme:

Painted in eye-catching blue, pink, red, yellow and other bright colors, the building resembles the indoor playgrounds that attract toddlers at fast-food restaurants. Inside, each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out. You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall.

Even worse, there’s no closet space; residents will have to find a way to live there, since the apartment offers only a few solutions. “You’ll learn to figure it out,” says Arakawa. Ten minutes of stumbling around is enough to send even the healthiest young person over the edge. Arakawa says that’s precisely the point. “[The apartment] makes you alert and awakens instincts, so you’ll live better, longer and even forever,” says the artist.

- quoted from a Newsweek article.

Speed up your Apple Mail

I found a nice little trick for speeding up your Apple Mail application today via the 37signals blog. It worked great for me.

Note of caution: If you’ve never opened the Terminal on your Mac before this is probably worth avoiding.