3 ms·

This seems like an opportunity Ghost should have taken to listen and learn - it sounds like the "on ramp" for their up-sell is just too slippery, and people end

by g_p 6y ago

This seems like an opportunity Ghost should have taken to listen and learn - it sounds like the "on ramp" for their up-sell is just too slippery, and people end up on the "on ramp" without realising. There is then a significant (3x) uptick in monthly fee. This strikes me as a missed opportunity to offer the discounted (paid annually) rate to the customer if they're wanting to upgrade, and a missed opportunity to improve the product experience so users don't add new users and unwittingly exceed their plan's allowance. Given the addition of a staff user involves user interaction, this could actually be used as an opportunity to get the user to select their plan to upgrade to, to enable this. Presumably ghost hoped to use inertia to slide users into more expensive plans, and this understandably upsets users. The response from Ghost however is disappointing and sadly emphasises my concerns around the growing reliance on "SaaS" business models. Given Ghost is open source, hopefully someone will see the opportunity for a more straightforward and transparent way of pricing and doing business, as the response here suggests there may be a small market for it.

HenryBemis 6y ago
As per the "$100 startup", one should drop the 20% of clients that take up 80% of your time, and focus the ones that are cost effective (noise-free profit). They may have (or not) learned their lesson and gave a full refund and closed the door. As a precaution/suggestion, when I work on an app (a website is a different thing but the analogy remains), I take a backup not (just) at the EOD, but "every now and then". It could be something simple such as zipping the folder with the xcode project (and files-images-etc), screenshots every now and then, so my time is not completely wasted. Ghost does have shitty controls (and probably practices as the article implies), it cannot be that they "forgot" to limit the value of number X to >=2 by accident. It's the typical scummy practice so you slip, they catch you red-handed and then charge you it since you already got used to using 4+ accounts. On the other hand, the author is also a bit shady. He knows that the limit is 2, creates 4, gets the warning, DOES NOT get charged, and then nags about it. Tried to cheat and got caught by someone (equally) unethical?

by g_p 6y ago

HenryBemis 6y ago

As per the "$100 startup", one should drop the 20% of clients that take up 80% of your time, and focus the ones that are cost effective (noise-free profit). They may have (or not) learned their lesson and gave a full refund and closed the door. As a precaution/suggestion, when I work on an app (a website is a different thing but the analogy remains), I take a backup not (just) at the EOD, but "every now and then". It could be something simple such as zipping the folder with the xcode project (and files-images-etc), screenshots every now and then, so my time is not completely wasted. Ghost does have shitty controls (and probably practices as the article implies), it cannot be that they "forgot" to limit the value of number X to >=2 by accident. It's the typical scummy practice so you slip, they catch you red-handed and then charge you it since you already got used to using 4+ accounts. On the other hand, the author is also a bit shady. He knows that the limit is 2, creates 4, gets the warning, DOES NOT get charged, and then nags about it. Tried to cheat and got caught by someone (equally) unethical?