May 8, 2019
Dear Thortspace … I don’t understand your business model
Please could you explain it?
Dear Thortspace, I don’t understand your business model. Please could you explain it?
Yes, sure !
Here’s the summary
- Free app (click here) and web version (click here)
- Free public spheres
- Subscribe to “Premium” to create and collaborate on private spheres
Here’s some more detail
Start by taking a look at this page on Thortspace.com: https://www.thortspace.com/planchoices/
So in broad brush terms:
- Thortspace Free enables users to share, sync and collaborate on Public spheres, which are fully public on the internet, and anyone with a web-browser can look at them. Also these public sphere pages may have discreet adverts (in the bottom right-hand corner) on them for products and services that are relevant to the content of a particular public sphere.
- Thortspace Premium whereas allows users to share, sync and collaborate confidentially with your colleagues, friends and family on spheres that only you and specific users (who you share with) can access. Premium users can choose to make their collaborations public, but syncing, collaboration and sharing works for Premium users without making spheres public (it only works for Free users on Public spheres). Premium users who do choose to make a sphere public benefit from it being free of advertising, which may be important to some users. Premium users also benefit from being able to embed their public spheres in IFRAMES, which may useful, for example, if you want to use Thortspace public spheres as a menuing or directory system for a website or a set of web resources.
- Thortspace Business provides the additional benefit of being able to manage a large number of users on a single bill, being able to add and remove users, and have spheres owned by your organisation instead of being owned by specific users.
In summary then, roughly speaking the approach we are taking is similar to things like GitHub. Public use is free (and in our case ad-supported), whereas confidential collaboration amongst team members (such as people who work in a small business, or a department of a larger organisation) requires a paid subscription.
I hope that makes the business model clearer. If you have any questions by all means drop a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.
Does the business model make sense to you?
It has become a fairly common idea with web services that public is free and private is subscription. The idea is that collaboration being done for public benefit is encouraged. If you are doing something that is for public benefit, but which cannot be made public, we have various scholarship and discount programs, eg. https://www.facebook.com/groups/thortspace/permalink/2574925965888924/ and https://www.thortspace.com/main/academic/
“How can I help?”
If you’re wanting to support the Thortspace ecosystem, just because you think we’re doing something good rather than because you have any particular need for a given choice here, the easiest way to do that is just to subscribe to Premium. Although this has not always been the case, just about all subscriber income we are now getting is being spent of improving the Thortspace App and Thortspace Web version, so, if you want to help us make Thortspace better, that will help us do so.
If you’d like to help in some other way, by all means send me an email to: andrew@thortspace.com
Or take a look at this article:
