You guys are awesome. Such terrific ideas. As soon as I ship social next month (and the iPhone app, ahem, tomorrow), I’ll get back to making a better premium flow.
1 Like
I read various daily web comics, and I’ve noticed that a few of them with very few readers will sometimes get two updates in one day because they’re only checked perhaps once a day, and the first update landed just after it checked. Your $100/month for 1 minute updates is a bit excessive for me, but I’d love it if $36 a year (or maybe even $48/year) would get me once an hour or once every 4 hours updates on my lesser followed feeds.
Check the site’s statistics. No feed should update less than once every 4-6 hours for a premium members (and that’s for sites with few updates, if any, per month, and only a single active subscriber).
Hmm. That seems to be the case. Good enough then, I’ll check the site if it happens again on any of my links.
Please let me see how much I paid and until when I paid in order to allow me to change plan.
Perhaps I started with $1 per month tp try it and want to pay $3 because I like it.
A monthly and yearly renewal should be an option too.
…and yes make the sharing features easier and link back to NewsBlur from where the share origined rather then the original story in order to bring potential users to Newsblur 
The social branch (which is only weeks away from launching, and is just about to enter a public beta) will have a lot more inbound URLs that will show your shared comments and will encourage you to link back to your shared links via twitter/facebook.
Also, changing plans is great, but would it pro-rate and charge you the remaining amount? I don’t charge monthly, I actually charge all at once for the year, so I would have to either offer a refund for a pro-rated amount (in essence, just charge that much less for the remained of the year if the user upgrades), or actually offer a refund if they go from $2 to $1. It’s a bit complicated, and I would only make this change if it makes a big dent in the aggregate. A few users wanting to pay more warm the cockles of my heart, but spending what could be a few days of dev work to eke out a few more bucks a month may not be entirely worthwhile.
Lifetime subscription? Don’t do it, Samuel! Unless some huge corporation buys them for 10,000 employees at $100 each, giving you a megabuck.
Continued revenue is something you need.
Lifetime subscription can still bring in continued revenue, until every possible person who might use the product has paid for it. Might even bring more than a subscription model. The “pay once, get updates forever” model works fine for software/app developers. Depends entirely on which model customers are more willing to pay into.
I just want to see until when my subscription period is going. Furthermore it should be possible to donate extra (because I have too much money, want you to have more or for other reasons) and it should be possible to cancel the subscription (which then will be effective at the end of the subscription year).
A lifetime subscription model can be very good. Look at Pinboard which does it very successfull. So I don’t believe that there is a definite answer to Yearly subscription or one time fee. Pinboard even has a one time entrance fee and a yearly subscription model for the users which want the “extra super good” service…
1 Like
Pinboard’s FAQ says they charge $0.001 * number of users. The current going rate for signup is $9.73 which means they have roughly 9730 users. At that price formula, that means they have derived about $47300 from user signup fees.
I’m not sure I’d describe that as “very successful”.
Furthermore, the Wikipedia article on Pinboard says that the signup fee was $9 in December of 2010, so they’ve only grown by about 700 users in the last twelve months, which would net $6500 in signup fees over the course of a year.
I think most of Pinboard’s revenue probably comes from the “archive” service ($25/year)…
Hmm? Pinboard had 15,000 users in Sept 2011, certainly more by now. http://www.quora.com/Pinboard/How-man…
Yeah, I really need to build this…
Well, then I guess the 0.001*number of users is not right. I got my $9 in Dec 2010 from Wikipedia, and I know it’s $9.73 today.
tenth of a penny is correct, apparently: http://blog.pinboard.in/2010/01/six_m…
But yeah, shenanigans probably.
What about for additional revenue whislt you go through the scale out you do some of the NewsBlur tshirts for sale?
Lifetime premium is not a good business model at all. It’s a desperate action when you’re close to bankrupcy and needs huge money quickly at all cost.
With it you’re expecting to offer premium service for the whole service life cycle, without receiving no more money for it after the initial payment. That money will go away, and your service will still be being serviced.
The only way for it to work is hope that lifetime premium users would leave in a shorter time than the time required for them to pay this amount in a subscription business model. They’d be so amused they’d think to stay a lot of time, pay for it then leave shortly… not a good way to work at all.
I myself would happily pay the yearly subscription if you’d just remove the 2-week auto-mark as read and add “saved stories” (starred articles is a way better name) into normal feeds workflow. With these 2 you already have mostly all features I need, so it would be just a matter of enhancing look prettiness and optimizing productivity making it easier to go straight to articles with most value to us.
Agreed. Also, I’d like to reaffirm my intention to pay once NewsBlur is able to keep more than 2 weeks’ worth of “unread” marks.
This is also known as the “Social Security” business model. Old subscribers subsidized by new ones, and you’re hoping enough of them die off that your future declining number of paying subscribers isn’t overburdened.
Yup, no plans to offer this pricing model. I am firmly in the subscription camp. It’s worked wonderfully so far and I don’t see that changing.