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I'll probably get buried but, here's what I'm going to suggest. Don't deviate from the price too much. I'll tell you why. You're competing with pancakeapp, bugg
by michaelbuddy 13y ago
I'll probably get buried but, here's what I'm going to suggest. Don't deviate from the price too much. I'll tell you why. You're competing with pancakeapp, buggenie, bugify, redmine, bugkick, mantis, Zoho (on some level) and many more, including some of the cheaper hosted basecamp clones. And I'm already considering buying yours. Your pricing is great. And I appreciate what you're doing.
I wouldn't go more than $69 or $79 if you raise your prices at all. If you have future build plans you can always charge for the next version upgrade or specific enhancements. If you want this to be the product you work on and support, try to charge what you can to sustain yourself and grow, but you're going to turn off a bunch of freelancers at some $295 price point that people are suggesting on HN. Somebody said, "for businesses of any size the difference between $250 and $45 is negligible." Um no, These same people (thousands of comments worth) are royally pissed about the Adobe Cloud pricing and are looking for alternatives.
I wouldn't even consider it at $295 price and many others wouldn't either. Why? Because I can get a proven system for many months or permanently at that rate. And for the FOSS ones, I might even become a contributor or leverage the community for enhancements or plugins in those cases.
HN is full of people trying to charge more and a ton of them are going to fail or become irrelevant. Basically your product is for freelancers, not enterprise. That's a fact, luck of the draw, however you want to look at it. Enterprise might trickle in after enough freelancers are rocking your system. Enterprise use Mantis, and that's free. Why should they be turned off by a low price. You might even find small businesses you didn't think of using you product that will be more attracted to your price. There are other things you can do, like try to get bundled with something else, or offer installation service at a rate.
Sell it on your own if you can using Stripe or some other managed provider that isn't taking so much of a cut. Or don't sell it exclusively on codecanyon. you should be making the majority of the money, a lot more than half.
- molsongolden 13y agoOne possibly unexpected use is for business consulting and accounting. I picked up a copy today to give it a whirl with a few side clients. My firm uses an enterprise solution with many similar features but the usability is horrendous and it doesn't offer online pay options, a project feed, or integrated document filing. The current price was low enough that I could afford to try it out without stressing.
- maratd 13y agoAgreed. I'm currently using http://www.fusioninvoice.com/ http://www.fusioninvoice.com/ which is a free open source Bootstrap/PHP/MySQL invoicing system. Has clients, estimates, invoices, etc. Very pretty, but doesn't have project management. This does. So I bought it. Pretty sure I wouldn't have if it was three hundred bucks. And yes, I'm a solo freelancer, so you're spot on.
- X4 13y agoI tried all of that. Including Fusioninvoice, Rocketinvoice, Pancakeapp, redmine, mantis, Zoho, BambooInvoice, SugarCRM and OpenERP and many little invoice tool, but none of them offers such great UX and UI. The workflow here is rocksolid. I didn't know of: buggenie, bugify, bugkick. Fusioninvoice is nice, but buggy and targets ONE language only, that English. (Why don't people think about i18n and l10n from the beginning, when designing something that's going to be used internationally.)
- markdown 13y ago> Or don't sell it exclusively on codecanyon Nobody in their right mind would do this. Envato rob you blind if you don't sell with them exclusively.
- DigitalSea 13y agoPancake user here and completely agree. Raising the price will only harm the product, I don't just base applications like this on their demo but rather the quality of the codebase itself. If I spend $250 on an app that promises the ability for me to customise it only to discover it's a poor mixture of PHP and HTML everywhere, I'd probably reconsider buying it. As it stands, I have no real use for this product because I already use Pancake, but I am inclined to check out the codebase. The benefit of Pancake is that it is built on Codeigniter and Codeigniter is a great, easy-to-use framework to modify.
- X4 13y agoI would also like to contribute. * Adding PDF.js or pdf2html * MDV based templating system for invoices and the core * Web-Component based eCommerce addon * Integration of Payment Gateways (klarna/paypal/cc) * Filestorage classes with seamless access to: rsync, owncloud, aws, dropbox, google drive etc.
- 23andwalnut 13y agoHi. Thanks for the feedback. The app actually already has pdf.js and two payment gateways. I would love it if you could shoot me an email so we can discuss the other features you mentioned...