Why we doubled our prices and removed our free plan
You shouldn’t choose our product because it’s cheaper. You should choose it because it’s better.
On October 22nd, we increased our prices and phased out our free plan. Existing customers get to keep current prices until 2020, and free users have a couple of months to find an alternative if they don’t want to upgrade to a paid plan.
Raising the prices is the responsible thing to do
Confrere was founded in July 2017, and the product has been available to customers since earlier this year. In order to build an even better product based on the learnings from our first customers’ feedback, we’ve grown our team. That was made possible by the recent seed round led by Point Nine.
We want to build a sound business and also ensure that Confrere is there for our customers in the years to come. To make this possible, we raised the prices.
Why do we expect software to be free?
Even as a co-founder of Confrere, I found it hard to set a price on our service. Like everyone else, I use a ton of free services every day, and those I pay for are often cheaper than the coffee I’m drinking or the book I’m reading.
Ten years ago, Chris Anderson published Free: The Future of a Radical Price, and popularized the idea that giving something away for free could be an excellent business model. Storage, bandwidth, and processing power were becoming increasingly cheaper. In that same period, the phrase “monetize later” was often thrown around: build a user base first, then figure out the business model later. I was in my early 20s, and I believed that was the future too.
What about the costs that aren’t ‘marginal’?
Even though the marginal cost of each additional user is nearly zero, you still have to pay the employees who are going to design, develop, and maintain the product. That 1% of the users pay $9 each month is of little help if you have 10,000 users and not 10 million.
Because we’re building a video calling tool for a new market that may take some time to grow, the numbers just weren’t adding up with our former prices. We have to charge more to build the product we want.
How are you paying when the price is $0?
When charging the user isn’t an option, companies often look for other business models. You pay in some other form, for instance, by your attention being sold to advertisers, by generating content that can be surrounded by ads, or by generating data that may be used for other purposes.
Confrere is tailored for professionals for which(video) meetings with their customers are at the core of their business: physicians and patients, lawyers and clients, recruiters and candidates, tutors and students, sales executives and leads.
For these professionals, the integrity of the tool is essential. The sensible business model is a paid subscription.
Why we added — and then removed — the free plan
So why did we have a free plan in the first place then?
We weren’t yet sure who would have the most use for Confrere. By introducing the free plan, we wanted to make it easier for people to try out Confrere to see if it would fit their needs.
However, the free plan was always intended to be very limited. It had a maximum of 3 team members, and neither payment integration nor custom branding were included. But we never enforced those limitations. Instead, we decided to phase out the free plan.
You shouldn’t choose Confrere because we’re cheaper or free — you should choose it because we’re doing a better job at solving your exact use case.
The price should change as the product changes
The first lines of code were written in August 2017, and we released the first version of Confrere in early 2018. It was a bare-bones product, and we set the prices accordingly.
Since the first release of Confrere into the wild, we’ve added several features:
- We offer Confrere in several languages. We already support English, Swedish, and Norwegian, with French, Spanish, German, and Dutch ready by the end of this year.
- Our API, which lets you build your own video service with a first-rate user experience, as well as support for all modern browsers.
- Our Intercom integration which makes it possible to have video calls inside the Intercom chat.
- A tool that helps people make sure their camera, microphone, and speakers are working, even if they’re not tech-savvy.
- Automated testing for network quality, which advises people on how they can improve their internet connection, and automatically adjusts bandwidth to ensure the quality of the video call.
- The ability to share your screen.
- A queuing system, letting your visitors know how many people are in line ahead of them.
- In addition, we’re currently working on improving our payment integration, as well as letting you manage your team members. Further down the line, we’ll also add video calls for up to four parties, and support the recording of video calls.
Building for a new market
There is no lack of free video calling tools out there, and they’re perfect for developers and other tech-savvy people. However, we’re trying to bring video calling into the offices of all kinds of professionals to whom meetings with people are essential to their businesses.
For a lot of them, replacing in-person meetings or phone calls with video calls means a more efficient and more pleasant workflow both for themselves and their customers.
We want to build that tool and to do it right, the price has to be right.
We hope to see you join us, and learn how Confrere can add value to your work. If you have suggestions for how we could improve Confrere to fit with your workflow, we would love to hear them!
