Comments (7)

1. Awesome, finishing building our site out and looking forward to subscribing to your premium side once we have a few kinks worked out…

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2. Have you considered that, with BuddyPress on the verge of drawing a lot of non-institutional users into the WPMU fold, you might be missing an opportunity to lower prices but make more money overall?

   Your current rates may be no problem for institutions in the developed world but could well be a barrier for individual MU enthusiasts and, quite possibly, institutions in the developing world, including the massive emerging markets.

   It has also been frequently noted elsewhere that your current subscription model encourages a “hit-and-run” mentality, in which people subscribe for a month at $50, download everything they can and don’t bother to participate in your forum, potentially your most valuable asset.

   High prices also encourage potential subscribers, such as Trace who has posted above, to put their purchase on hold. It is generally accepted wisdom that a customer’s hesitation often results in the loss of a sale.

   My suggestion would be that, with this unique shift in the nature of WPMU’s userbase, you have an opportunity to draw all these new users into your community and not only make more money overall but give all your current subscribers a much more active and useful forum.

   For a start you should end the one and three-month memberships which discourage true participation and, instead, offer a much cheaper annual membership. Something around the level of $99 would allow you to sweep up pretty much all the potential subscribers. I understand that you would be reluctant to halve the money you make from your current subscribers but it is pretty obvious that your current focus leaves a lot of potential earnings on the table. It is also worth noting that, if you don’t serve these new users, you leave the door open for a competitor who may well end up drawing away your current subscribers too.

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3. @Donnacha: You bring up a very interesting point. I can definitely appreciate the difficulty in pricing a service such as WPMU Dev Plugins…. with virtually no similar services around to compare to, it’s even more difficult to get a foothold on where the sweet spot might be…. do you target large commercial companies with a higher price and how much will they pay? Do you target the masses with a lower price and what is the sweet spot that will not be too low and too high? …. and on and on.

   If I were making the decision, I would do a few things (some or all of which WPMU Dev may already be doing) ….. 1) look at the data, what percentage of signups cancel in one to three months? Is the promise of future revisions and updates of WPMU that might break plugins enough to help subscribers stick around? 2) Get customer feedback 3) make projections based on lower pricing (hard I know) / make projections based on annual subscription vs monthly…. then ask yourself, “Can these projections even be close?” … the point is, think about it, work through the numbers and experiment …. great spreadsheet exercise… 4) try to dig up general data on other subscription based services, maybe even the models of companies like WooThemes an the like can be of help 5) Insure the value add of new, updated and shiny new plugins, services and benefits are coming at a regular pace. I’m speaking generally here, but who wants to subscribe to WooThemes or similar services if they never update their themes…. stagnation breeds hit and run subscribers and Donnacha eluded to… Make the service stand out, tout it’s benefits on a regular basis and although it may be pointless to continually come out with new plugins, never stop writing about existing plugins, services and how you are improving them or updating them…. there are enough plugins that not everyone is familiar with them, simply writing about one that already exists and highlighting it, may cause a reader to think, “Wow, I didn’t even know they had that!”…. you get the idea….

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4. I suspect that attracting attention isn’t WPMU Dev’s problem – there’s has never been as much interest in WPMU as now, and it will only continue to grow as both WordPress and BuddyPress grab more and more mainstream interest – but my guess is that practically none of this new audience is going to subscribe at the current rates.

   Pricing intangible products is always tricky, and it takes a brave company to mess with a formula that seems to be working. The upward trajectory of WordPress alone ensures that, month on month, WPMU Dev are making more money selling to their current target market, mostly the IT departments of institutions who have no problem authorizing a few hundred bucks. On paper, their current pricing must seem to be a winner.

   What I am saying is that people like you and I, who have had to hesitate and not yet subscribe, we probably represent a far larger possible market, one that dwarves their current base of subscribers, but because their interactions are mostly with those institutional subscribers, they probably don’t realize it.

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5. Good discussion guys, thanks for the feedback :)

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6. Well, in my case $250 for a year was a good price 6 months ago. Since then the $ got 50% more expensive in my country and at the moment this is too much …

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7. @James: Just read your posts regarding monetizing MU… great stuff… I had no clue you were veterans at this…. love the feedback you give regarding what has worked and what hasn’t… we’re changing our model a bit based on what you wrote… especially in terms of the features available to new users… I have a gung ho attitude towards giving as much for free as possible, but at the end of the day, I can give better service and a better product if I can monetize in a smart way and reach users that are REALLY interested in the service… anyways, for $250 a year, your service is a no brainer for us… now I just need to improve my php so I don’t drive Andrew absolutely insane.

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