Their new pricing page breaks many of the "rules" for getting conversions (eg. clear call to action). It will be interesting to see if they blog about the results of it.
Just finished reading Rework. in that book they usually tell that they rarely implement new features because most of them are redundant for most of the users and only a few would benefit out of this. Personally,I am not a Basecamp user and I really would like to learn what's new.
(I'm not saying this as a negative thing, it's going to be really interesting to see the response to this, I know there was a blog post a while ago saying there hardly anyone on the free account upgraded) I'm using a free basecamp account but we only have one project and $20/$25 is just a little much for that a micro plan at $10 would be awesome :) )
I agree. $20/mo is definitely going to be too expensive for a ton of potential customers. I guess it's a luxury that 37Signals can not only afford, but will maximize their profit and I would assume they have some good historical data to back up the decision.
I do think that there is a magic $5-9/mo range that individuals will pay without thinking too much. Above that amount, they start equating a subscription with a trip to the movies or a (cheap) night out and you've lost them.
I totally disagree, $20/mo for a service like Basecamp is not expensive. I pay $20-50/mo per month for a whole host of services (hosting, backup storage, payment processing, etc.) and don't really think twice about them since they're business expenses. FYI: I'm an individual who has a full-time job but does projects/apps at night with a separate LLC.
I agree--$20/mo is not expensive but like @thehodge says... it all adds up. I think that in this space tho, you have a huge market of people who are "pre-business" who just couldn't justify 5-10 $20 services a month when they are pre-profit or only making a few hundred a month off of their products. Basecamp could appeal to some of these folks with a sub $10 offering.
Agreed. Someone else here already pointed out "hey, time tracking in basecamp is limited - we use harvest and integrate". OK, so now you've got 2 $20/month services (or whatever harvest costs). Then another $10-$20/month for another service. And another. And another. And that's usually $10-$20/month per user. A small company could easily be paying $500/month for a few services for a handful of users. Are they getting $500 or more of value from it? Possibly, but smaller orgs tend to be more gunshy about spending money, however small, without free tiers. Perhaps those are the companies that you don't really want as customers anyway?
I think 37signals won't do that for the same reason Apple won't make a $399 laptop, they don't want to be in that business. That's not the business they're in, and knowing what business you're in and not in is extremely important. I'm sure there are a dozen Basecamp competitors with $10/mo plans that would probably fit your needs.
I totally disagree. Certainly hosting costs that much, backup usual not and payment processing never. When compared to services with a free tier like ZenDesk, Yammer, Twilio, Stripe, DropBox, BiBucket and Trello, I don't think your comment holds water at all.
For a consumer product, $5-9/month is probably a good price point depending on the product. To a business, $20 per month is a great starting price. Businesses have a different set of demands than a consumer. The value of Basecamp has definitely proven itself to be worthy of that rate. There are "free" services out there that do similar things, but to a business they probably feel more secure paying for a service, knowing that they'll be around for the foreseeable future.
Some assumptions, to be sure, but you say "we only have one project", so that implies multiple people, so if you are employed by this work you must be pulling in several thousand dollars per month. $20/mo for a product you need to (or at least want to) use to accomplish this work and earn money is an absolute pittance.
It depends on what value you put on basecamp, most of what we do is on git and we pay for a large github account.. I don't want to be a free customer but I disagree that $20 is nothing in the long term when most of the features offered to me I'll never use
Four friends and I were using free basecamp to track a personal free-time project we are working to turn into something more. That's five people on free Basecamp, not making any money (in fact spending out of pocket), but it's at times been an invaluable resource. Just, for our scale, not $20+ a year invaluable.
I'm fine with Basecamp Next being "not for me" right now because of that, but that doesn't mean I'm not a little disappointed.
As others have posted here about other businesses, prices under around $20/month start to rapidly become unprofitable. One common reason cited is that a price of e.g. $10/mo doesn't allow any budget for support time, etc. Lower price points work for consumer applications with potentially massive scale. But businesses unfortunately need to pay for results.
I think $20 is cheap enough.. I'm wondering why they switched all prices to ending in 0 now and how that will affect conversions. I feel like we are always so used to ending in 9's or 7's
Thanks! Seems indeed a lot of useful stuff was dropped. I wonder if that was based on usage analysis, or just an opinion on what the product should have.
It is a shame that API appears to be only an afterthought. Otherwise third parties could possibly offer some of the missing features.
It's definitely not an afterthought. If you're interested in beta testing the API feel free to email me at nick@37signals.com, and I'll get you hooked up.
My name is Jeff Morse. I'm a Recruiter at a super-charged start-up called Mixbook www.mixbook.com I came across your profile on hacker news and have a full-time Jr. Backbone developer opening working onsite in our Palo Alto, California office that is a great match for your background/experience. Would you be ready to make the move to Silicon Valley, the most innovative place for web start ups which offers superior growth opportunities for talented Backbone developers like yourself? Mixbook will pay for all relocation costs.
Would you be open to taking a phone/Sykpe call from our CTO, Aryk Grosz (see attached LinkedIn profile) to discuss the position further? If interested, email me your Skype ID and I’ll coordinate the call with Aryk.
I notice the new version is running on basecamp.com. The old version is at basecamphq.com and 37signals always made a point about the domain not mattering as much as the product name. I imagine there's a follow-up to that saying that if your product becomes successful there's nothing wrong with going and grabbing the pure domain (thinking Dropbox, Instagram and others. Or basically the opposite of Color.)
"Your Basecamp Classic URL (which looks like yoursubdomain.basecamphq.com) stays the same. New Basecamp accounts are hosted on the basecamp.com domain. New Basecamp accounts don't have subdomains, so all accounts are at basecamp.com."
It looks like they're gradually simplifying. They originally launched with a range of domains you could choose from: projectpath.com, clientsection.com, grouphub.com, etc. with a subdomain. Then it went to subdomains on basecamphq.com, and now just basecamp.com with no subdomains.
That's exactly what happened. It was actually confusing for people since different people on the same project were referring to Basecamp with different names. That's one of the reasons we migrated everyone to basecamphq.com and now, basecamp.com on the new accounts.
That was the first thing that caught my eye too. I would tend to agree with the assessment that a perfect domain name is negligible compared to having a successful product offering. You can take that too far, but for the most part a domain name doesn't matter all that much. It's a stupid investment for a struggling entrepreneur to spend thousands of dollars for a new domain. I think another significant reason they decided to go ahead and purchase the domain now, is that it was part of a larger effort to rebrand the product.
"Project name is bigger than domains" is a part of lie part of true: Product and it's name important but if you can't get the domain just be arrogant and say to people it doesn't matter. But because you know the importance of the domain name , when you have money and chance get the domain and rule the world.
We purchased the domain from the previous owner a few months ago. We wanted to use it to launch the new Basecamp since the Classic version used basecamphq.com. We wanted to keep the URLs separate so this seemed as good a time as any to make it happen.
> Basecamp Classic and the new Basecamp don't offer the same features, so some data in Classic won't make it into the new Basecamp.
So maybe I'll stay. But wait...
> Will you continue to improve Classic? The majority of our design and development efforts moving forward will be focused on the all new Basecamp, but we'll continue to support Classic as long as customers continue using it. We expect that to be for many many years.
Maybe. Maybe not. The web moves very quickly you know. New browsers, standards, security risks etc. I can think of a million and one reasons Classic will get EOL'd sooner rather than later.
This is certainly faithful to their backwards compatibility intolerance. The new product couldn't be bound by the "burden" of the old. Now I the customer am left with a very distasteful choice to make.
For a company that goes on about transparency and clear speaking etc., the answer to the second question you've quoted is appalling. It doesn't answer the question at all. It should be:
Will you continue to improve Classic? No. We will fix any bugs or other problems that stop our customers using Basecamp Classic but we will not be developing new features. Our focus now is on improving Basecamp Next so that Classic customers are happy to transition.
What's appalling about it? It's not necessarily true that we won't add new features. This is day one right now. We don't know how things will pan out. It's disingenuous to say we won't do something that we might do.
As stated, the majority of our resources will go towards the new Basecamp. That's honest and as clear we can be without misleading anyone.
I just felt that the answer dodged the question. Your response to me answers the question i.e. you don't know if you will improve Classic. By saying the majority of design and development efforts will be focused on Next and then saying that you'll continue to support Classic implies by omission that no further improvements will be made.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not criticising the position of you not knowing - it's a fair position given this is launch day. I'm criticising the fact that the answer to the question didn't say we don't know.
Sorry, but this is exactly what continue supporting in context of software means for everyone. This is a standard term, there's nothing disingenuous. You don't expect new features in your old Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation without upgrading to a new version, do you? But you can expect bug fixes as long as it's supported.
Congratulations to the 37signals team on launching the all new Basecamp. Just migrated our projects from Basecamp Classic and it's working beautifully.
What about the API? Is it still going to be supported in the new Basecamp or will it remain just for the classic Basecamp? I really hope there will be some kind of continuity where the data structure make it possible.
Beside this, it looks really clean and fast. I like it! :)
I'd also say its not vague - they probably spent a great deal of time naming the pages/titles from a usability & SEO standpoint. I like the redesign a lot.
Thanks. To be honest, we didn't think much about SEO here at all. We thought about customers. Well written pages that speak clearly and explain products thoroughly are automatically good for SEO. SEO gains are side effects of good writing.
Looks like there isn't any time tracking in the new Basecamp. When you upgrade it says that won't be moved over. I wonder if this is to be added later or not many customers use it. At my previous company this feature is the reason we upgraded to a higher plan.
I didn't use basecamp before and I'm just testing a little bit. Seems to be quite fast.
What I kinda don't like: If you click on e.g. a discussion, a modal-window-like layer pops up where the discussion is displayed. Now how can I go back? First I was quite unsure how to do this without clicking on the browser's-back button.
Then I figured out that you can click out of the layer and the layer disappears. I think there's a need for a "close"-Button..
I enjoyed the ad for wysihtml5 in the console on pages that use it. "Heya! This page is using wysihtml5 for rich text editing. Check out https://github.com/xing/wysihtml5
First time I've seen that, but makes sense for an OSS project to promote itself to people who would have the console open, i.e. devs.
155 comments
[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadhttp://basecamp.com/pricing
(I'm not saying this as a negative thing, it's going to be really interesting to see the response to this, I know there was a blog post a while ago saying there hardly anyone on the free account upgraded) I'm using a free basecamp account but we only have one project and $20/$25 is just a little much for that a micro plan at $10 would be awesome :) )
I do think that there is a magic $5-9/mo range that individuals will pay without thinking too much. Above that amount, they start equating a subscription with a trip to the movies or a (cheap) night out and you've lost them.
I'm fine with Basecamp Next being "not for me" right now because of that, but that doesn't mean I'm not a little disappointed.
I suppose the big difference is that Basecamp offers unlimited users.
Also, does the API (http://developer.37signals.com/basecamp/) stay the same?
The API isn't ready yet, soon though!
It is a shame that API appears to be only an afterthought. Otherwise third parties could possibly offer some of the missing features.
Seeing this new Basecamp product makes me even more so want to use the OLD Classic version ... yet I can't.
And obviously the difference between other ruby shops and 37signals is that they are the reasons other ruby shops exist.
Hi Jeremy,
My name is Jeff Morse. I'm a Recruiter at a super-charged start-up called Mixbook www.mixbook.com I came across your profile on hacker news and have a full-time Jr. Backbone developer opening working onsite in our Palo Alto, California office that is a great match for your background/experience. Would you be ready to make the move to Silicon Valley, the most innovative place for web start ups which offers superior growth opportunities for talented Backbone developers like yourself? Mixbook will pay for all relocation costs. Would you be open to taking a phone/Sykpe call from our CTO, Aryk Grosz (see attached LinkedIn profile) to discuss the position further? If interested, email me your Skype ID and I’ll coordinate the call with Aryk.
Cheers,
Jeff Morse
Sr. Recruiter
Mixbook
408.234.2400
jmorse@mixbook.com
We're Hiring http://www.mixbook.com/careers#job-openings
Our Product: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_dhKroiAo4
About Us: https://gist.github.com/1960387
I'm just explaining it. I don't think that posting it as humor out of context is good posting on Hacker News.
From: http://basecamp.com/transition
They didn't own basecamp.com then, now they have.
"Project name is bigger than domains" is a part of lie part of true: Product and it's name important but if you can't get the domain just be arrogant and say to people it doesn't matter. But because you know the importance of the domain name , when you have money and chance get the domain and rule the world.
I want to migrate, but...
> Basecamp Classic and the new Basecamp don't offer the same features, so some data in Classic won't make it into the new Basecamp.
So maybe I'll stay. But wait...
> Will you continue to improve Classic? The majority of our design and development efforts moving forward will be focused on the all new Basecamp, but we'll continue to support Classic as long as customers continue using it. We expect that to be for many many years.
Maybe. Maybe not. The web moves very quickly you know. New browsers, standards, security risks etc. I can think of a million and one reasons Classic will get EOL'd sooner rather than later.
This is certainly faithful to their backwards compatibility intolerance. The new product couldn't be bound by the "burden" of the old. Now I the customer am left with a very distasteful choice to make.
Will you continue to improve Classic? No. We will fix any bugs or other problems that stop our customers using Basecamp Classic but we will not be developing new features. Our focus now is on improving Basecamp Next so that Classic customers are happy to transition.
Their response is completely disingenuous.
As stated, the majority of our resources will go towards the new Basecamp. That's honest and as clear we can be without misleading anyone.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not criticising the position of you not knowing - it's a fair position given this is launch day. I'm criticising the fact that the answer to the question didn't say we don't know.
http://basecamp.com/sprockets-c5fcdbcede3dff502006bc5d0d7bef...
EDIT: Told the team about it in a ticket, JIC.
I'd also say its not vague - they probably spent a great deal of time naming the pages/titles from a usability & SEO standpoint. I like the redesign a lot.
First time I've seen that, but makes sense for an OSS project to promote itself to people who would have the console open, i.e. devs.