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At Userify[1], we just made our primary product (user and SSH key management for cloud servers) completely free. We're charging incrementals for feature upgrade
by jamiesonbecker 11y ago
At Userify[1], we just made our primary product (user and SSH key management for cloud servers) completely free. We're charging incrementals for feature upgrades, faster sync (from 3 minutes down to 10s), etc.
On the other hand, this hasn't slowed down our enterprise sales cycle at all; in fact, it seems to have sped it up, with five enterprise deals in the pipeline right now.
However, this approach is risky and it's really hard to get the balance right; companies that have raised rounds might have to answer to investors. Still, sometimes it's worth prioritizing long-term growth over short-term revenue.
My view is that we should always have something free or very cheap for the smaller technologist/hacker/startup. They tend to bring their favorite solutions to other larger companies. Goodwill is one of the best growth factors.
1. https://userify.com https://userify.com
- zephod 11y agoTrying to scroll your website on a Mac trackpad causes it to jump around like crazy. Did you install some too-clever-for-its-own-good Javascript? (Has anyone else noticed this is an increasing - and annoying - trend?)
- agopaul 11y agoAs an MBP trackpad user, I can't think of a more annoying web trend. To the point that I'm thinking of finding a way to disable this kind of behaviour and make a Chrome extension to block this thing everywhere.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Klathmon 11y agoWeb developers just shouldn't ever try to fight the useragent. If you find yourself trying to "fix" a UI/UX in the browser itself, stop. I don't care if you want 300ms faster clicks on mobile, or to force smooth scrolling in chrome, or to hijack right click for your sharing stuff, or whatever. You are breaking stuff trying to do those things, and it's ruining my experience on your site.
- paulcole 11y agoIf their A/B testing indicates a net gain, why should they care about a specific user's experience?
- marcosdumay 11y agoUser agents change. If it's a clear win, they'll implement the behavior soon, and you'll be left with a broken site.
- jamiesonbecker 11y agoThanks for the heads-up, and sorry about that. Was this on Safari? Removed smoothscroll.js. Is it working better now?
- amackera 11y agoWorking fine for me
- jamiesonbecker 11y agoThanks. :) I'm on Linux Chromium and it worked fine for me, but maybe it was Safari not liking the accelerated scrolling plugin. (Off-topic, why are so many site themes bloated with bells-and-whistles..)
- Cyberdog 11y agoSafari user here, not noticing any scroll highjacking currently. Thank you. Your web site still does other awful things, but at least you've banished the most obnoxious, most instantly-want-to-close-the-tab sin.
- jamiesonbecker 11y agoThanks for checking! What other awful things? We'd like to fix those too!
- Cyberdog 11y agoOkay, well, first off, keep in mind that I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to the web and generally dislike more things about the modern web than other people, so I don't really fault you for just writing me off and ignoring all of this. That being said, here are, in my opinion, the remaining awful things about your web site. 1. The loading animation. I did not wait for your page to load in order to wait for your page to load. Also, if I have JavaScript disabled or JavaScript breaks for some reason, all I can see is that loading animation - absolutely zero of your front page content. 2. The text scrolls up into the middle of the page. Nothing should move on your page without my permission. 3. The fading in/out red text. See 2. 4. The spastic dots/lines following the pointer around above the globe image. See 2. 5. As I scroll, the bar at the top hovers over the page content. This breaks PgUp/PgDn behavior, as it covers content, as the height of the page no longer matches the amount of the page that's actually legible. Also, the bar changes size and color. See 2. 6. You're using a custom font. Are the perfectly fine fonts already installed on my system not good enough? Must you really waste my bandwidth and slow down your page loading time for the sake of your brand? Fortunately, you're using one hosted by Google; I have `127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com` in my hosts file, so it actually didn't effect me. I could still see it trying to happen when opening up Web Inspector, though. 7. I'm seeing your total front page weight as 1.82MB. global_map2.png is 512K. essentials.css is 468K - Jesus, that's a lot of CSS. Even the HTML file is 111K - apparently because you're inlining jQuery, on every page, forcing my browser to redownload it for every page load when it could just grab it from cache after the first one. That's all I'll say for now. I need to get back to work. Hopefully this is of some help, though. EDIT: Just to balance things out, here's a good thing - you're bouncing users to the HTTPS URL for your site, even when we're not logged in (or about to). Good!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- alextgordon 11y agoYou need a better layout for your API documentation. It's a wall of text. Add in a navigation sidebar, or better yet just copy Stripe. Also the how-tos are too longwinded. You could probably reduce the quantity of prose by 50% or more. e.g. the very first paragraph "Getting logged in is easy and takes only a second..." is waffle and missing a vital opportunity to explain how the damn thing works!
- jamiesonbecker 11y agoAlex thx -- this is great feedback. We'll get these cleaned up!
- wise_young_man 11y agoThere's an open source project called Slate [1] which is basically a static site generator for API docs you might consider which looks like Stripe's API docs. [1]: https://github.com/tripit/slate https://github.com/tripit/slate