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I recently met Neil at a conference in SC, and I've known and done prototyping work for Hiten for a little over a year. I was also one of the original alpha tes

I recently met Neil at a conference in SC, and I've known and done prototyping work for Hiten for a little over a year. I was also one of the original alpha testers for this product. I am 100% confident the pricing decision was founded in hard data and experience. One of their other products, CrazyEgg, aimed for and delivered incredibly heavy functionality. However, it resulted in disproportionate load on their people and infrastructure - and it's obvious they've learned their lesson. People will pay these prices. More to the point, the people who are very serious about this sort of funnel honing will pay these prices. Also, if you're bootstrapping... bootstrap. Hack together something to track your highest priority funnel. Don't harsh on a product so obviously unintended for you.

hopeless 16y ago
I can see the support point of view: reduce the number of customers = reduced support burden. But a "Starter" plan could come with lower (or no) support commitments. There could also be disproportionately less events (i.e., $10 for 20k events vs $149 for 1m) "a product so obviously unintended for you" I guess this is the part which really annoyed me: until the pricing was announced, KISSmetrics was exactly what I needed and there was no indication that it wasn't being targeted at me (or any other small business). Most of the buzz I've read, and recommendations I've seen, were from other small businesses so I don't think I was alone in being surprised by their positioning.
- patio11 16y ago
  But a "Starter" plan could come with lower (or no) support commitments. I wrote a piece of OSS A/B testing software, which is rather similar to funnel analysis in application, what type of businesses it appeals to, and who will likely be implementing it. My software is used in some small places and some big places. It has not been my experience that big places tend to take up more of my time than small places. Integration is hard. Educating users is hard. ("You seem to be under the impression that A/B testing software includes genetic algorithms to write copy for you. This is not in scope for this project, but you're welcome to patch it in...") These don't get less hard just because you're firing the API less than Employee #4602 at BigCorp. (If the user can do 100 API accesses without incident they can probably do a hundred million. Scaling is just a matter of getting the architecture right, and you don't have to redo that on a per-user basis.) Also, BigCorp has internal engineering resources that they will likely fall back on prior to emailing you, where one-man shops might be more inclined to mail you first.
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hopeless 16y ago

I can see the support point of view: reduce the number of customers = reduced support burden. But a "Starter" plan could come with lower (or no) support commitments. There could also be disproportionately less events (i.e., $10 for 20k events vs $149 for 1m) "a product so obviously unintended for you" I guess this is the part which really annoyed me: until the pricing was announced, KISSmetrics was exactly what I needed and there was no indication that it wasn't being targeted at me (or any other small business). Most of the buzz I've read, and recommendations I've seen, were from other small businesses so I don't think I was alone in being surprised by their positioning.

patio11 16y ago
But a "Starter" plan could come with lower (or no) support commitments. I wrote a piece of OSS A/B testing software, which is rather similar to funnel analysis in application, what type of businesses it appeals to, and who will likely be implementing it. My software is used in some small places and some big places. It has not been my experience that big places tend to take up more of my time than small places. Integration is hard. Educating users is hard. ("You seem to be under the impression that A/B testing software includes genetic algorithms to write copy for you. This is not in scope for this project, but you're welcome to patch it in...") These don't get less hard just because you're firing the API less than Employee #4602 at BigCorp. (If the user can do 100 API accesses without incident they can probably do a hundred million. Scaling is just a matter of getting the architecture right, and you don't have to redo that on a per-user basis.) Also, BigCorp has internal engineering resources that they will likely fall back on prior to emailing you, where one-man shops might be more inclined to mail you first.
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