lol. Years ago that was simply the free tier, and IIRC one or two projects stayed free forever.
Then they went all corporate and introduced enterprise pricing at about 10x the previous rates, and entirely nuked the free tier. Nothing - pay big or get lost. I won't be falling for it again.
My memory is probably a little earlier, but somewhere around the 2014-2016 range, when growth stops on that graph. Work stopped using the paid tier at the same time as they were looking at a huge 200 or 400%+ price increase. So I imagine it started quite an exodus of non-enterprise level users...
Work ended up finding something better at less than the Basecamp old price, let alone the new ridiculous one, though we did have to try out a fair few to get there. :)
Was more the 200-1,000% price increase I, and at the time work, objected to than the complete removal of a free entry / trial tier without warning.
They went from a typical SaaS freemium offering 3 or 4 priced tiers based on some level of use, and a small "forever free" demo tier for freelancers, right up to something like $199 or $250 a month for everyone.
Work immediately went looking for alternatives after that, so they lost a paying customer too. Did us a favour in the long run, and Basecamp left very much looking like last-decade's answer.
> They went from a typical SaaS freemium offering 3 or 4 priced tiers based on some level of use, and a small "forever free" demo tier for freelancers, right up to something like $199 or $250 a month for everyone.
I think it was $99
> Work immediately went looking for alternatives after that, so they lost a paying customer too. Did us a favour in the long run, and Basecamp left very much looking like last-decade's answer.
As Jason used to point out, it's perfectly OK for people's needs to grow and for them to leave and go to find someting else. The point of the product is to be simple and easy to use. It's great for small to medium sized businesses and it will likely never have feature parity with more complex project management software.
It is a feature that Basecamp doen't grow with you. It doesn't change out from under a company who like and want it to be the same. It serves a very specific market, and it's not Basecamp's responsibility to change as you do.
Difficult though your company may have found a price increase to $99 or whatever it was, I think "last-decade's answer" is off target. There are still a load of people using it, and every release only ever accellerated signups. See this older graph at the bottom of the page, each uptick in accounts is a new Basecamp release:
I'm a new potential user and it seems nice to get all essential project management tools in one place for me, though basecamp now faces more competitions.
any alternatives can provide similar/better services? wrike or monday.com? I used to run my own redmine but I got tired of maintain a ruby ecosystem solely for that. Yes I know basecamp is based on rails but it's SaaS instead of self-hosting for me.
For context, I worked there while it was the original Basecamp and stayed past the Basecamp 3 launch. I left ~4 years ago.
This doesn't ring true to me:
> …went all corporate and introduced enterprise pricing at about 10x the previous rates … pay big or get lost.
So, Basecamp never "went all corporate" as far as I could tell, and I disagree with the "enterprise pricing" thing. Basecamp has always experimented with pricing, and tiers, and things did change, but as far as I remember the prices bounced around below the $150/month mark, and ISTR once settled on a single $99/month plan or something for quite a while.
It was always pretty affordable for the target market, small to medium sized businesses.
Dumping the free plan was probably something that they talked about at the time, I can't remember, there's probably a blog post about it somewhere, but ISTR it was something like because free accounts didn't really convert to paid accounts at anywhere near the rate you might hope for, and they still cost money to service including hosting and support. For instance, I seem to recall it being calculated that one single support request would cost about $5 or more to service. The Free tier was only free for the end user ;)
Now, I'm not in Basecamp anymore so I don't know what the reason is for bringing it back, but consider it an experiment. It's not set in stone.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 31.4 ms ] threadThen they went all corporate and introduced enterprise pricing at about 10x the previous rates, and entirely nuked the free tier. Nothing - pay big or get lost. I won't be falling for it again.
Work ended up finding something better at less than the Basecamp old price, let alone the new ridiculous one, though we did have to try out a fair few to get there. :)
That graph is "artistic" and doesn't represent reality. Check out this earlier, far more reality accurate graph:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170701044638/https://basecamp....
You might not have liked the new pricing, but from memory signups only ever acellerated.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170701044638/https://basecamp....
The two upticks in account numbers were when new versions of the products where released. I honestly forget which these were, 2 and 3?
They went from a typical SaaS freemium offering 3 or 4 priced tiers based on some level of use, and a small "forever free" demo tier for freelancers, right up to something like $199 or $250 a month for everyone.
Work immediately went looking for alternatives after that, so they lost a paying customer too. Did us a favour in the long run, and Basecamp left very much looking like last-decade's answer.
I think it was $99
> Work immediately went looking for alternatives after that, so they lost a paying customer too. Did us a favour in the long run, and Basecamp left very much looking like last-decade's answer.
As Jason used to point out, it's perfectly OK for people's needs to grow and for them to leave and go to find someting else. The point of the product is to be simple and easy to use. It's great for small to medium sized businesses and it will likely never have feature parity with more complex project management software.
It is a feature that Basecamp doen't grow with you. It doesn't change out from under a company who like and want it to be the same. It serves a very specific market, and it's not Basecamp's responsibility to change as you do.
Difficult though your company may have found a price increase to $99 or whatever it was, I think "last-decade's answer" is off target. There are still a load of people using it, and every release only ever accellerated signups. See this older graph at the bottom of the page, each uptick in accounts is a new Basecamp release:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170701044638/https://basecamp....
any alternatives can provide similar/better services? wrike or monday.com? I used to run my own redmine but I got tired of maintain a ruby ecosystem solely for that. Yes I know basecamp is based on rails but it's SaaS instead of self-hosting for me.
This doesn't ring true to me:
> …went all corporate and introduced enterprise pricing at about 10x the previous rates … pay big or get lost.
So, Basecamp never "went all corporate" as far as I could tell, and I disagree with the "enterprise pricing" thing. Basecamp has always experimented with pricing, and tiers, and things did change, but as far as I remember the prices bounced around below the $150/month mark, and ISTR once settled on a single $99/month plan or something for quite a while.
It was always pretty affordable for the target market, small to medium sized businesses.
Dumping the free plan was probably something that they talked about at the time, I can't remember, there's probably a blog post about it somewhere, but ISTR it was something like because free accounts didn't really convert to paid accounts at anywhere near the rate you might hope for, and they still cost money to service including hosting and support. For instance, I seem to recall it being calculated that one single support request would cost about $5 or more to service. The Free tier was only free for the end user ;)
Now, I'm not in Basecamp anymore so I don't know what the reason is for bringing it back, but consider it an experiment. It's not set in stone.