30 days is what they said in original email: "While this pricing change will only affect a small number of merchants, you will need to login to your account and make the appropriate changes within the next 30 days."
Respect your desire and need to price accordingly. I also believe you need to respect the need for current clients that had certain expectations (a bootstrappable billing service that starts at $0).
If you are not going to grandfather the old prices, at lease give a long transition period. I would suggest six months given that this is a service that requires integration and customer interaction.
100% agreement. Our small team has spent the better part of 2 months getting ready to rollout subscription pricing for two separate apps with Chargify's model in mind. We cannot roll them out faster and loved the option to grow slowly. Once we had 50 customers we knew there would be no hardship in paying for Chargify. It was great that these guys "got it" and really understood what bootstrappers go thru. Now it does feel like we got "punched in the gut" as another user said.
Yes, exactly. I thought the same thing. "Finally, there's someone out there who understands the needs of a bootstrapping, young business". But apparently it was a scam. If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
There's no way Chargify would have the customer base they have now having launched with these pricing plans from day one. With the several other options out there, someone starting out with nothing would NOT choose to pay $100/month right off the bat, without even considering hosting costs and merchant/gateway costs, knowing there are other options out there for $19/month. I'm happy for them that their "too good to be true" pricing sucked in some customers, but it sure does suck for us.
The attitude that "there will always be cheaper options out there, but we won't be one of them" is a far cry from how it was early on. It used to be "we understand, and offer the best pricing around". It was so relaxing to know that $50/month would get you up to 500 customers, with 49 of them being at no charge (even 10-15 at no charge would be great). Coming from that, no, $39/month for as little as 1 customer does not feel like a good deal, unfortunately. Downgraded from $100, maybe, upgraded from $0, no.
I'm truly shocked the old prices aren't going to be grandfathered in.
I think I'm going to bite the bullet and (re-)integrate with someone else. Ugh.
Price increase from $0 to $39 without a long transition period still does not work. If this came out at the start of the day, the outcry would've been same as $99. Feels different with the "change" but don't be fooled.
Chargify can charge what it wants, but the pricing change was abrupt and BIG. Apps on the ground floor went from FREE to $1200/year. No grandfathering, 30 days to accept. For a service that needs to be integrated, that's a terrible move that shows no respect for startups.
What's worse is that if you're already using them, you basically have no choice in the matter since the alternative is trying to get all of your customers to sign up again, which is basically a non-starter. Note that they also doubled prices for their first tier of paid customers from $600 to $1200.
This is the evil next business model: Free "bait and switch". Get businesses to sign up with a service that is free but requires integration. Then start charging. Integration makes it very difficult to switch.
Well, technically you have all the customer data in your gateway's info manager (like Authorize.net's CIM), but it would still be a real bitch to take that and do anything useful with it. Plus, the clock is ticking on your 30 days to get it migrated to your new setup.
Honestly, I haven't looked closely at the raw A.net API. I heard about Chargify, pricing looked good, and it fit my model. Basically, I wanted someone else to deal with dunning, expired cards, running the periodic charges, etc, etc.
