New Pricing with Dollars and Sense
I’m excited to announce the next evolution of TidyHQ. When I started building Tidy as a hobby I worked on it before and after work, there was nothing too serious about it and no need for a rigorous revenue model. I just wanted it to make enough money to cover the cost of running it online. Back then it was called TidyClub and as it became more powerful, more sports clubs like my own wanted to use it.
Eventually I quit the corporate job and started working full-time for my own little TidyClub company. Then I got a team of developers and things started scaling in productivity and cost. So things have changed dramatically over the past decade and particularly in the past 12 months.
The biggest change has been our growth, we now have over 10,000 administrators in over 40 countries. We count our customers at both ends of the spectrum with small non-profit community organisations through to the national AFL sporting body and their thousands of community clubs around Australia. With this growth comes increasing levels of support and development.
Many of the 10,000 administrators on the platform have questions, some complain and some request a lot of features. That’s the nature of the software business, of course. And we love being in the software business and making our customers as happy as possible. We work really hard at it.
Our own expectations are exceedingly high, we push ourselves to provide the most valuable service and software that we can. The funny thing is, we haven’t been valuing ourselves enough.
With growth comes great responsibility and we’ve heard your requests. We realise that you expect more and more from the platform and we want to provide this for you. Unfortunately our revenue hasn’t been able to keep up with our user growth and as a result we need to increase our prices to continue to support and build a great experience for everyone.
We wanted to remain a completely free service so there were no barriers for community and not-for-profit groups. At the same time, TidyHQ needs to be a sustainable, predictable business for our users. This is also one of our core values. This meant that we needed to change our internal mindset and approach and believe that good software is worth paying for even in the community space.
As part of this process we’ve spoken to customers big and small, with the overwhelming majority encouraging a more sound and structured pricing model. Their support and understanding really blew us away and has been really encouraging. In fact some groups noticed a change to our revenue model was required well before we did, with several making sizeable donations over the years in kind — thank you!
The work of the TidyHQ team aligns with that of the community minded organisations we are serving. Our core values haven’t changed in the 10 years since they were established. Here are three of them:
- We built TidyHQ to help community groups be more efficient and effective so that everyone, especially the volunteers, can enjoy being a part of the fun.
- TidyHQ’s financial incentives are entirely tied to successfully delivering a service your Organisation can depend on and that you would pay for.
- We are operating a sustainable, predictable business.
Considering all this, we’ve had some hard talks with ourselves and will be moving away from a platform focused on being free, to being paid and sustainable. Having spent hundreds of hours talking to a myriad of stakeholders we think we’ve found a good balance. We trust you’ll find that your organisation fits neatly into one of the new proposed packages.
For the really little guys we’re still offering a free Mini plan which should cover those community groups starting up. The priced tiers for TidyHQ will begin at $39AUD per month (billed annually).
We are incredibly proud of the work you do using TidyHQ and have greatly appreciated your support helping to build a great platform for all. We look forward to working with you as we continue to build great software for community group administrators.
