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App.net pricing changes
- k-mcgrady 14y agoI've never thought app.net was a good idea for many reasons but I think this is a good move. Introducing a monthly plan is the smartest thing they could have done. With so many yearly plans starting at the same time (when it launched) they could have seen a big drop in users as people reevaluated their decision to purchase in a years time. With the $5 monthly fee I think people are more likely to continue paying for it - there is no time where they will be forced to reevaluate the value the service provides.
- samspot 14y agoI might be an atypical consumer, but I re-evaluate monthly subscriptions quite often, usually with a recurring "Cancel X?" reminder on my calendar.
- brianwillis 14y agoCombined with the bonus time I got for signing up early, my renewal date is now in April 2014. That $50 went a long way.
- tisme 14y agoI think you will only be able to say how long it went when it expires.
- rbreve 14y agoapp.net should be free for developers
- k-mcgrady 14y agoWhy? Developers will make money off it, the whole idea is that developers will never get screwed by app.net, and they introduced a developer incentive program to help compensate developers. If you're interested in the platform how is that not worth $5 per month?
- catenate 14y agoIt's bad enough I spent $50 to read it. I'm not going to pay $50 more just to mess around with trying to create an app for it. It should be free with membership to create an app for it, and charge the $50 when the app has noticeable traffic.
- k-mcgrady 14y agoI didn't realise they charged an extra $50 for developers. The original comment made it sound like he wanted it 100% free. I agree, they shouldn't be charging extra on top of the membership.
- drgath 14y agoWhere is the guarantee that developers will -never- get screwed by App.net? Especially since the barrier to entry is $100? The DIP is a nice addition that will help those with solid ideas out of the gate, but they are still greatly restricting the developer pool by a pay-to-play model. Along with that, I still have seen no compelling reason to pay $5/month to be a member of a social network where there are sub-20k users who (I assume?) barely use the service. App.net is just capitalizing on those annoyed with Facebook/Twitter developer policies. Great for their bank account and a really smart idea, but I still don't see value for anyone else. As someone else once said, "App.net is a social network for people who have $50 to show-off that they have $50 to blow." That's not a party I feel compelled to attend. I'm open to a convincing argument though.
- mootothemax 14y agoFunnily enough I'm of the opposite mind: users free and developers paying something like $50/month. I'd imagine placing such a price barrier there would vastly cut down on the abuse that twitter, for example, has to put up with.
- protomyth 14y agoWhat abuse from developers does twitter have to put up with?
- eik3_de 14y agoThe current number of users can be found at http://recentusers.com/ http://recentusers.com/ Homework for the bored hacker: create a graph with user-ID and days. The IDs are sequential integers. See https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec/blob/master/resources/users.md#retrieve-a-user https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec/blob/master/resources/...
- iamdann 14y ago> If you are an existing member, you should have received an email from us explaining the extra time that has been added to your subscription. Did anyone else not receive this (yet?)?
- SubFuze 14y agoQuick! Someone register http://ihave36dollars.com/ http://ihave36dollars.com/
- untog 14y agoSomeone already got http://ihave5dollars.com http://ihave5dollars.com.
- kmfrk 14y agoMaybe I'm weird, but I like $35.99 much better than $36.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- david_shaw 14y ago> we are dropping the Member price from $50/year to $36/year. I think this is a great move. We see a lot of posts on HN about raising the price to increase your userbase, but $50 was too high for a product in such an early release stage. Great for those die-hard early adopters (probably the people after whom Dalton was chasing), but terrible for the everyday Twitter user who is tired of the horrific signal-to-noise ratio on that service. That said, my opinion would be that $24/year would be even better for an annual subscription. $2/mo is a lot of money for a "Twitter clone," but is cheap enough that it would be easy to convince your friends or colleagues to sign up. $36 might have hit the price point that I'll give it a shot as a (relatively) early adopter, but I'm not sure. $5/month, almost double the annual subscription fee, is too much for a thirty day trial run. I'm one of the (few?) believers that app.net can really take off. I've tried Twitter, and while I'm relatively active, I can't help but feel that I'm lost in the oft-cited "echo chamber." I'm looking for a service with Twitter-like abilities, strong interaction and an intelligent community, and I think app.net will (someday) be it. Congrats to Dalton for lowering the price in what must lead to hugely increased participation.
- drgath 14y ago> I'm looking for a service with Twitter-like abilities, strong interaction and an intelligent community, and I think app.net will (someday) be it. I'm curious... Considering your version of Twitter only consists of who you follow, why do you believe it would be better if those same people were elsewhere?
- JeremyMorgan 14y agoI think it will be better simply because spammers can sign up for hundreds of Twitter accounts and spam like crazy. When they get booted they just re-sign up. Doing so at app.net means paying $36 bucks, far less likely. That goes for normal people too, when they pay something they tend to respect it a bit more. Forums have been doing this for years.
- drgath 14y agoRight, but none of that has any effect on your own tweet stream (unless you follow spammers). If you are talking about searching, the only way search is valuable is if a service gains critical mass, and the only way that happens is if the barrier to entry is low enough that enough users join the service, which will include spammers.
- ben1040 14y agoIf you buy the $36 (formerly the $50) plan can you get a prorated upgrade to the $100 developer plan later?
- quartus 14y agoYes you can.
- brianwillis 14y agoInstructions on how to do this: http://support.app.net/customer/portal/articles/760978-how-do-i-upgrade-my-account-from-member-to-developer- http://support.app.net/customer/portal/articles/760978-how-d...
- ben1040 14y agoAwesome, thanks. I feel more inclined to try it out if I know that I won't have to completely re-buy an account when I inevitably want to tinker around with the developer side of things.
- wilfra 14y agoI'll sell my account for $35.99.
- epscylonb 14y agoThe developer plan is still $100?. I never really understood this, it seems more logical to me to give all members the developer perks. Most of the users won't use them, and those that do are helping to promote the app.net service and get new subscribers.
- rexreed 14y agoThe bar is set somewhat high to limit the proliferation of poor and mediocre apps, rather than to encourage that. They want "serious" developers (at least for now...) and the price point is set to weed out lower quality apps that can hurt the nascent network.
- eps 14y agoAllow me to make a bold predication - the App.net will be done in a matter of months. Even if it becomes absolutely free. The reason is Tent. If Tent drops the ball and doesn't fully execute the idea, someone else will. Their idea is bigger, better and far better maps onto the interest of various 3rd parties (such as hosted service providers) that wouldn't hesitate to support it. Commoditizing the social services is a great idea with balls and vision. Creating a paid Twitter clone is not.
- jonursenbach 14y agoI thought that the whole point of App.net wasn't to build just a Twitter clone, but something that you could build any sort of social service on top of.
- mtgx 14y agoA link describing Tent, for those who haven't heard about it: http://www.informationweek.com/development/open-source/tent-promises-open-distributed-social-ne/240006057 http://www.informationweek.com/development/open-source/tent-...
- wmf 14y ago2010: App.net will be done in a matter of months; the reason is Diaspora 2009: App.net will be done in a matter of months; the reason is OneSocialWeb 2005: App.net will be done in a matter of months; the reason is Appleseed Why is this time different?
- tobylane 14y ago
- ruswick 14y agoDoes anyone know whether or not App.net has plans to release an official app for iOS and Android? One of my major apprehensions (besides what I believe to be a still unjustifiable price) is the fact that most of the current apps available appear to be shit and cost a non-trivial amount of money.
- rcknight 14y agoOn iOS I have been using Felix. It may be a non trivial amount of money, but is excellent (especially for a v1) - very polished. The other popular option is rivr, which has a slightly different take on things, and maybe not as pretty as others, but is free.
- johns 14y agoAdian is good and always improving. "Official" apps sort of runs contrary to the whole idea.
- kmfrk 14y agoMore discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4599129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4599129.
- cs702 14y agoSo, growing 100% from 10,000 to 20,000 users allowed App.net to drop annual pricing from $50 to $36, which implies their expenses grew by only 44% (from around $500,000 to around $720,000). If expenses continue to grow at similar fractions of the rate of user growth, App.net should be able to price the service for around $5 per year with just over a million users. At that pricing point, App.net would become a compelling economic proposition for many consumers.
- jmduke 14y agoHow is $5/year with one million users more compelling than free/year with five hundred million users?
- ceejayoz 14y agoNot having to deal with 300 million spam users?
- hobonumber1 14y agoHow is it spam if you're responsible for choosing who you listen to vs who you ignore?
- dannyr 14y agoIf you want to interact with the community, it's an issue. Post something on Twitter mentioning "IPad", you'll get a lot of spam accounts replying. It's hard to engage with other users if you have to comb through the spam.
- ceejayoz 14y agoYou choose who you follow, but you don't choose who @replies to you.
- ChrisLTD 14y agoThe reason parts of the tech celebrity circle (like Gruber, Siracusa, and Arment) supported App.net was because of Twitter's new hostility to third-party developers, not because of spam.
- markmm 14y ago$36 for a twitter clone with < 1% of the users, where do I sign up!!
- redguava 14y agoI don't understand why they are dropping the price. They wanted 10,000 users, they got over 20,000. Surely that tells them the price wasn't a problem. Why give up so much revenue when it seems like price isn't holding them back?
- rexreed 14y agoIt's motivated by the desire to sell a $5/mo plan. Simply put, $50 a year is not compelling enough for annual subscriptions when you have a monthly plan that ends up at $60 a year. If they had decided not to offer a monthly plan (or set the price higher), they would have kept their annual plan at $50. They see monthly plans as a way to get to a larger market, which explains why that drove pricing decisions.
- snilan 14y agoThe vast majority of people (at this moment in time right now) would never, ever think of paying for a social network. That would be akin to asking them to pay for their Gmail account. It's just not going to happen.
- __abc 14y agoI still don't know why anyone outside the techospher will ever pay to use app.net. Does a material number of users outside the techosphere even care that some apps are having their access restricted? Does anyone outsidethe techosphere even know app.net exists? More importantly, App.net is still a closed box, just like Twitter. App.net still has to pay the bills, just like Twitter. When faced with the same decisions in the future, what prevent app.net from making similar decisions as Twitter? Will $5 a user per month really cover their costs if they hit scale (I know they have other revenue streams, but I'm guessing they will have more users than anything else)?