Why we changed our Free plan

Fred Oliveira on September 27, 2010, Comments (18)

As some of you know, with the recent update to our new Teams and Permissions functionality, we had to do a few updates to our Free plan (namely, reducing the number of users and projects it allows you to have). This came as a bit of a surprise to a few of our users, one of which emailed us. The email we sent is below. We are posting it here (edited slightly for brevity) in hopes of hearing your feedback on this change.

I understand your frustration. Changing our Free plan (particularly for users who were already on it) has been a tough decision. Alas, also one we had to do. Maintaining an open service for many (many) thousands of free users is tough, and it takes a toll on everything we do. Support email is filled with requests from free users and more servers are necessary to run the application.

We love having the ability to give people our product for free - I’m sure we help many people who wouldn’t be able to pay for our paid plans in managing their personal projects. We do it with pride. We do, however, run it at a cost we pay for ourselves, and there’s only so much that our bank accounts can stretch to support free users.

In order to keep accommodating people on the free plan, we had to change its limits. There were people managing big money making companies (even household names) with our free account as its limits were quite permissive. That is an unsustainable situation for us. So what we did was level our free offering with the rest of the competition, and hope the product speaks for itself.

We feel like we have the number one product out there for online project management and collaboration. We also have the most competitive pricing. In short, what I’m saying is that we believe that if you go beyond 1 project and 2 users, you’re probably good for our startup plan, which we believe is pretty good.

I hope this helps explain our reasoning.

At the end of the day, we’re honored that people choose our product over the competition. It makes us proud, and makes our team come back to do this every day. We’re sad about having to limit our Free plan a bit, but our business so demands. Our goal is the same: to provide the best service out there, and to keep improving our product. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

Comments:

I am actually one of the FREE plan users who were affected by this change.. But really, I think you do offer the best project management system out there and you just have to make it work. I understand this bold move of GoPlan. I’ll most probably be purchasing your startup plan soon! =)

Hi guys, got no problem here. Just a question though, on the free plan how many collaborators can we add to the project?

Robert: thank you so much for the kind words!

Lance: Actually, the notion of collaborator was removed with the teams update. Previously a collaborator was someone that had access to only a given project. Now you can add a new user and assign him to any number of projects. For that particular user, the end result is the same. For you, however, everything becomes simpler (and for us too, because the collaboration code was quite complex). Free plans can manage two users right now, whereas startup can manage 10, and pro/unlimited can manage an unlimited number of people.

Lance: on the free plan you can have two (2) persons, yourself included.

Caros, agora que sei que vocês são de Portugal, tenho mais tranquilidade ao depositar meus projetos no GoPlan.
Sou do Brasil e adotei o GoPlan como meu software de gerenciamento de projetos, depois de testar vários outros. E afirmo: nem o basecamp conseguiu suprir como vocês supriram minhas necessidades.

Obrigado mesmo!

Agora, pergunta nova: como faço para inserir um ticket por email?
(se não for por aqui que devo perguntar, desculpem-em).

Abraços

A decision met with nothing but support. Far too many people see fit to abuse fantastic free services without thinking twice about the sacrifices involved by the providers of said services. Do as you must. If it be that you provide less freebies in the interest of making your paid versions more robust and effective, so be it. $10 is laughable in monthly fees. Those complaining might want to reconsider their financial situations if that’s too much to ask per month.

Stand firm, guys. Every change will be met with nay-sayers.

After all, you can’t make an omelette without um… destroying a forest. Or something.

How do i seing up for a free plan. I want to test drive then sign for the 10 bucks a month

How i sign up for a free plan?

Mark: the link for the free plan is right below the rest of the plans on our Plans/Sign-up page. You can, however, sign-up for the Startup plan (or any other plan you like) and use the 30 day trial - it should give you enough time to try things out. You don’t have to put in any payment details until you’re ready to leave the trial.

Bruno, obrigado pelas simpáticas palavras :)

Quanto à tua pergunta, para criar um ticket por email cada projecto tem um endereço próprio. No ecrã de criação de Ticket, na barra lateral esquerda (por baixo do menu) está disponível o endereço de email. Este endereço permite a qualquer pessoa (mesmo que não seja membro do Goplan) criar tickets nesse projecto.

@Fred @Mind, thanks for the explanation :)

I’ve happily upgraded to the Startup plan and I absolutely agree, the original Free plan was a bit too… “Free”. In hindsight I should have upgraded a long time ago to show you guys support for such a rocking product but I just needed a little nudge.

Thanks guys, love the new features!

Erlingur: You rock! Thanks for the support.

I also really understand the move, Goplan product marketing needs another structure if I understand.
However, for the sake of better understanding, I would have enjoyed a more detailed explanation about the downgrade (projects “in excess” will be erased ? randomly ? archive behavior ? … so on).

Thanks and good luck !

Hi François! We won’t delete any of your data, obviously :-) You’re in control. What we’ll do is ask you to archive projects from the project list and remove any old users you might have.

I agree 100% with the answer. Our company also provides the basic version of our flagship software for free. And it does take a toll on our human resources. We are a start up and we used the free version of the app, but soon realized that its such a help to us, we opted for the startup plan (before the changes done on the basic plan). We are so happy with this product, it has helped bridge the distance between our clients, and more importantly has helped us prioritize our tasks. We really couldn’t ask for more, and as our company grows rest assured we will be seeking to upgrade our plan as well.

I will probably stick with the free plan, and I’m glad you offer it. It blows Basecamp out of the woods.

Thanks for taking the time to explain the changes to us.

I admit, I was one of the people bummed by the changes to the free plan at first. But having to restructure my projects made me realize how much time I was wasting by setting up projects for prospects or pro-bono clients. Also, it forced me to evaluate which collaborators were really valuable (managing tasks, adding to discussions, tracking time, etc).’

After the adjustments, I ended up switching to the paid plan and for $10/month, it delivers all I need and more. Also, having a paid account just motivates me more to bring in new projects and increase revenue.

Although it sucks for to see things change sometimes, I’m personally thankful that we are freeing up resources for things like support and new feature development.

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