Our Biggest Developments Since the Initial Woopra Launch
Hello fellow Woopra fans!
For over two years your Woopra team has worked tirelessly to build, refine, scale and support this new platform while overcoming the challenges associated with operating a service with a growth pattern that mirrors some of the biggest names on the Web. There is one significant difference however between Woopra and the other big names. Our business is privately funded, without a penny of venture capital investment. Yep, Woopra is a good old fashioned family business where the founders bet their own hard earned cash on the success of the idea.
I don’t mind telling you, two years of work is a long time to wait to see the fruits of your labor, and it’s a very long time to operate a business using your own money. It has been the strength and passion of the Woopra community that has driven – and continues to drive us – on to build the world’s greatest Web analytics platform.
As we approach the 100,000 Website mark, we are preparing – with your help – to take Woopra to the next level. As a result, it’s important that we involve every single member of the Woopra family in this next stage of our evolution.
I put together a short video to accompany my thoughts below. Before you watch it you must agree to the terms and conditions of the video:
- I’m from Texas, so I talk slow. No making fun of me. :-)
- I’m not much to look at, and I’m definitely not a pro. So don’t expect a Dave Courvoisier or Cali Lewis. (Both long time Woopra users by the way!)
- Yes, that is my real hair. Yes, I have 3 monitors connected to my MacBook. And yes, I’m white as a ghost.
Now, on with the video!
Five Things Everyone Should Know
1. The Woopra Beta program is coming to an end.
In the coming weeks we’ll remove the Beta label from the Woopra service, and make a few changes to some Woopra features. The most important change will be an end to the waiting list for service.
However, there is a catch. People wishing to sign up for a paid version of Woopra will be able to do so at any time, while those who are interested in the free version will need to obtain an invitation code in order to register a site.
The reason for this remains the cost associated with providing free accounts. Woopra simply must prioritize service for those who are able to help defray costs. Our priority is to reach a cash flow neutral position in order to ensure a sustainable growth model. So, I’m not sure when we will be releasing more invitations for free accounts. But as soon as we are confident that we can support the business financially, we will continue to make more free Woopra accounts available.
2. Page view limits will disappear forever.
As I believe everyone is aware, Woopra beta testers have been limited to 10,000 page views per day. This allowed us to ensure that we didn’t over-extend our infrastructure’s capabilities, and enabled us to share Woopra with as many beta testers as possible. But soon, you’ll be able to instantaneously upgrade to any level of traffic necessary to ensure Woopra tracks all of your visitors, every day.
We are also moving from a daily page limit to a monthly page view limit. This ensures that daily fluctuations won’t force Webmasters to upgrade just to see all of their stats simply because of occasional usage spikes.
Here is a sneak peak at our thoughts on the new Woopra pricing tiers in USD (These are not necessarily final! So you can’t hold me to them.):
I hope you all notice that the bottom pricing tier has been set at only USD $4.95 per month. The decision to set this pricing so low was difficult, as it’s much easier to support fewer clients paying a higher amount. Our goal has always been to make real-time analytics available to everyone, so it was important to us to be as inclusive as possible.
My hope is that these price points come as a pleasant surprise to most of you. I also hope you’ll let me know if this is the case in the comments below.
3. Existing accounts to convert to the “Free” plan in the coming weeks.
Free plans sound good! But there’s always a catch, right? ;-) The good news is that the Free Woopra plans are essentially unchanged from the service that we’ve all grown used to. But there are a few things to consider:
- Free plans are limited to 30,000 page views per month. This will cover the vast majority of Woopra users, but some sites will require upgrading or they will be restricted to the first 30k worth of visitors each month.
- These plans are limited to 90 days of statistical history. Storage is one of the things that really drives up the cost of providing this service. So we have to cut the historical reports to a bare usable minimum for free accounts.
- Limited features in other areas. You’ll notice that free accounts can’t run all the same reports, won’t have multiple shared user options, and several other features. Its in the nature of free. :-)
- The new features we have in the queue will be mostly available only to paying clients. While there may be occasional new features deployed into the Free version, the majority of cool new stuff will be automatically available to those who pay.
When the change takes place, your account will revert to the free plan unless you opt to upgrade to any of the other plans. Of course, upgrading to any of the paid plans helps ensure Woopra’s continued development, and will also help fund that huge list of upgrades we have planned for the future!
Frankly, even if you think the free plan will meet your needs, I hope you’ll consider one of the upgrade plans to allow us to hire additional developers to continue blowing your mind with great new stuff the likes of which the world has never seen! :-)
4. Free accounts are for personal, non-commercial use.
Woopra’s Terms of Service will soon be changing to reflect the fact that our free accounts are intended to be used for personal and non-commercial use only.
What does that mean? Well, we are happy to provide as many people as possible with free Woopra service for their blogs and personal Websites, but at the same time we believe that if you are using your online presence to earn a living, it’s only fair to help us earn one, too. In other words, if you are a commercial entity – just like Woopra – we need your help to keep paying those big electric bills that all our big servers run on.
This clause is going to be based on the honor system. It’s not our desire to police our user community. We just have to rely on you guys to do the right thing here, and I, for one, have absolute faith that we can indeed count on your support.
5. The customer loyalty program is in the works.
With several major projects nearing completion, we will soon begin development of a customer loyalty program designed to reward Woopra users who refer people to join our big happy family. Full details will be coming soon, but its our intention to provide those of you who are interested in participating with a unique link you can use for referrals. We will track those links and provide signup statistics inside your control panel.
You can think of this as an Affiliate Program, but with the catch that you must be an active Woopra user to participate. We simply aren’t interested in referrals from people who don’t believe in the service enough to use it themselves.
In Summary
Now that I’ve shared all of this detail with you, it’s important to note that over the next couple of weeks, there may be some strange things going on with access to the service as various features go live and changes are implemented. Please bear with us as always and know that we are working as fast as humanly possible to get things squared away.
It’s also important that you watch carefully for our updates on the status of the service. If you use Twitter, please subscribe to the official @Woopra (for general Woopra news), @WoopraStatus (for maintenance, issues, and interruptions updates) and @WoopraMembers (just for fun!) accounts. You may also wish to follow me @JohnPoz, our CIO Elie Khoury @ElieKhoury, or our Editor in Chief Lorelle VanFossen @LorelleOnWP as we all three routinely post Woopra updates. Also, our high usage and business clients should keep an eye on Terry Green. He takes care of businesses with needs into the several million page views per day! And as always, don’t forget about our Contact form.
I know that the transition from Woopra being a “free” beta to a paid service might feel a bit shocking to some. Even though our minds might tell us it makes sense, our hearts long for that which is free! Alas, neither Woopra nor anything else is ever actually free. So I would ask that you take a moment and ask yourself one question, “If Woopra was going to disappear without my support, what would I do?” Then please… follow your heart!
Very sincerely,
John P.
John Pozadzides
Chief Executive Officer
iFusion Labs, LLC.
OneMansBlog.com
Twitter.com/JohnPoz
Facebook.com/JohnPoz
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Woopra and rutgerblom. rutgerblom said: RT @Woopra: IMPORTANT: Woopra is coming out of BETA! This affects ALL Woopra users! **Please RT!** – http://bit.ly/1xOAPY [...]
Awesome news!
John, congratulations!!!
For me it’s the best service! You made a great work!
I’m not native speaker, but I just want to say thank you Woopra team!
Cheers from Perú
Love the service and will certainly upgrade.
Is the cost per month or per website? Are the limits per account or per website?
Here in support of your success.
Tim
sorry the above was meant to read ‘Is the cost per month – per account or per website?
Hi, that’s great news, Woopra has done a great work for us!!
But what about raising a bit the bar for free PV?
Going from 300000/M to 30000/M is 1/10…
maybe we were too well accoustomed :-)
Tim,
The plans, when rolled out, will all be per Website/per month. We toyed with the idea of having “Per account” plans where people could lets say have several websites that shared an aggregate number of pageviews, but it didn’t take into account a lot of other factors. For example, “domainers” will add literally hundreds of domains to our system, each with very few page views, but they could be using our sharing feature with a large number of people, chatting live, and leaving Woopra running all day on 10 machines. And we came up with a lot of other examples that would put disproportional load on the system.
Dave,
I understand that the 30k PV limit is a big decrease from the 10k max daily limit that we had imposed on users during the Beta. But the limit during the beta was really just to prevent abuse, and the vast majority of users never came anywhere near the limit, so this isn’t really a cut for them since they won’t even consume the 30k per month. The logic behind that number however is that sites above 1,000 page views per day are generally either businesses, or have advertising and other revenue streams attached to them (or easily could). For the most part we are only asking people to kick in a very small amount of money each month to help sustain our cost of doing business.
Thanks for the comments and questions guys.
John P.
hey john & team congrats on the roll out.
I will be happy to pay for the upgrade.
As for my input, as a cheapo I’ll be 10x happier if there is more added value. I’m thinking of few in-depth videos on ins and outs of woopra Or podcast on woopra, SEO, and web analytics. I don’t think it will hurt your wallet (much). and It will make some of us have an emotional investment to the application, also a personal obligation to make sure your team are fed.
just my 2 cents,
jacky
[...] more details on the coming changes and the pricing structure, check out the official Woopra blog post. WoopraWebsite: http://www.woopra.comFounded: March 2008 Overview: Woopra is a Web analytics tool that [...]
Hi John & Team of Woopra, as always you bring us fantastic news
and finally after 2 years its time to go out of beta..
You have my 100% support, tho my site is very small ( 3k pw a mounth)
I will upgrade as soon its available for supporting you guys!
Woopra IS the best statistic platform ever build, so congratulations to all you over there @ Woopra and good luck in the future!
[...] Woopra that was founded by 2 Lebanese off their homes and reviewed by ArabCrunch here and here, announced that in the coming weeks it will remove the beta label and introduce paid [...]
I’m sad because I can not then use Woopra. The free account offers me not just what I need, and unfortunately I have not paid enough money. shame!
This is so exciting, guys!! You’ve all worked so hard and given us so much of your blood, sweat, and tears – and for that – I thank you!!!! Love Woopra!!!!!!!!!! :D
John,
My daughter asked: “What’s a Woopra?”
Sincerely,
@giovanni
@giovanni: LOL. See the little guy with the head like a planet? Tell her that’s our Woopra mascot. :D
@ALL: Thanks to all for your support. We’ve been listening to you through our Forums, Blog and social media sites for a long time and your input right now is critical to help us understand how we can succeed while making Woopra work for you and meet your needs. Keep it coming!
@ALL: We’re closing approvals for beta testers today, extending the time due to the high demand and WordCamp Portland, where we were doing a presentation on Woopra and web analytics (want Woopra at your event, let us know!). We are stunned at the enthusiasm and last minute push to register sites on Woopra. Wow! Thank you all for your support and for helping to spread the word and love about Woopra!
Jacky,
Your requests are spot on. We are planning to make several in depth videos with walk-throughs of the features and suggested ways to use them. We’ll be featuring them on our blog, along with guest posts from users who describe how they use Woopra to improve their own situations, be it to generate more traffic, increase conversions, etc.
On top of the education part, we have a number of new features in the works that will be added for paying customers which will further increase the value for them. So stay tuned! But remember, we need the support of paying clients so we can speed these features to market! What might take months with our current staff would take only weeks if we can afford to hire a few extra developers…
Thanks for the suggestions!
John P.
First and foremost congratulations on going live. I’m sure all of your hard work over the past two years will payoff. It’s been fun to watch Woopra grow and change since we got to first start playing with it at #WCDFW08.
It’s also commendable that you managed to do this without funding. Again, congrats and here’s to your success.
Scott
Oops! As I said, you can’t hold us to the pricing I put above. :-) We are not removing chat from the free version. But let me be clear, because chat has several variations:
Carry on…
John P.
Thanks for clarifiation on the pricing structure.
Any likelyhood of having a pricing structure for say: 1 site, 2-5 sites 6-10 sites etc. Else it can all become pretty hefty billing if each site has to be paid for as a seperate entity. Or even accounts limited to: 1 user 2-5 users etc.
Assuming the answers to the above are no, will an account holder be able to have free and paid for websites at various levels. As I have both personal blogs and business sites.
When permitting a paying customer to add a website with automatic approval, does that new site have to be a paid for site?
Tim,
Great questions.
1) Nothing is impossible, but grouping the sites is not likely right now because of many logistical problems associated with it.
2) You can absolutely have both free and paid sites. Each site will be on it’s own “plan”, and we can even accomodate different billing for each site within an account! So you could have some sites billed to a work credit card, and some to a personal, some to a client, etc.
3) This is a great question that I haven’t tackled yet. I would like to allow our clients who are contributing to be able to add free sites before others. I just don’t know how we’ll pull that off yet. Perhaps we can do something like… for every site that you are paying for, you get “X” number of invitation codes for free plan approvals? I’ll talk it over with the team and see what we can do about that.
Thanks again,
John P.
Congratulation, this must be an exiting time for you. I’ve certainly enjoyed Woopra, especially being able to get a comment from any of you on the forums.
I have some suggestions on the price structure/benefits.
- Somewhere on the plans, it would be nice if not necessary, to be able to have unlimited storage. Or maybe the opportunity to store “old” data locally so that historic data isn’t lost.
- Unlimited users would also be nice or at least many more.
- What about better integrations to third party programs like Omniture has to Google Adwords with Omnitures Search Center for better covering the business segment. It could also be to interesting initiatives like Survey programs Limesurvey, Email campaign program Mailchimp or adserving program OpenX just to name a few :-)
So what I’m basically aiming at, is making this a possible alternative to the big business traffic analysis programs on the market with strategic partnerships and playing around with open API’s :-)
Thomas,
We are absolutely thinking along the same lines.
1) Storage – This is a battle we are waging internally with billions and billions of records in our ever growing databases. The goal is to archive as much as possible, for as long as possible. But you would not believe how much hosting providers charge for drives. It is literally outrageous. However, in the future as we realize some income I think we’re going to be able to solve this problem creatively. So, we may be like G-mail and just increase retention over time. But we need to reserve the option to charge a modest fee for additional storage down the road in case we can’t get the cost down. Like maybe $20 per year for additional retention or something like that.
2) Users – We can’t really do unlimited users on the shared platform because of potential for abuse. But see my note below…
3) Integration – YES! We actually have a full API to our service, AND our client actually has plugin capabilities. We just need to get through this launch and get some paying clients to help us hire a couple of developers to finish this up and then you will see some VERY unique developments. We intend to make Woopra the one stop shop for monitoring basically everything you could possibly need. We’re already built for it, we just need to roll some of these things out. Believe me, we want Woopra to be all you need, because we use it too! :-D
I should also say that we do have the ability to have unlimited storage, users, chat sessions, etc. for corporate users. It involves getting a dedicated server from us as opposed to being on our shared stats platform. We do that for several clients already, and Terry Green @WoopraTerry can help any business clients obtain a dedicated server.
Cheers,
John
Congrats on moving out of BETA =)
Kinda sad about the decrease in page views. I have one site that is busy. The site does about 450k in page views per month and brings in $0. I can’t afford to spend $30+ a month more for the site =/
Speaking of such, will there be discounts for Educational and Non-Profits? (REAL non-profits, not sites that just don’t many any profit LOL) I manage a couple other sites for (true) non-profits.
Well, again, we haven’t yet decided how to deal with the Non-profits and Educational site issues. At this point, every one of them is better funded than Woopra. ;-) So we need to see how things go. If we are able to have a sustainable model, I certainly don’t mind helping support true non-profits. But we have to first ensure the company’s survival before we can do that.
Obviously, you can’t help others if you can’t even help yourself!
John P.
John. I will say a big congrats on this. You guy did a grate job. You know I always say I love woopra. yeah am gonna say it again. I love woopra. Woopra rocks!!!!!
Hey John,
Congrats on a great product. These prices are quite reasonable, and i’m looking forward to the new version of Woopra.
Anthony.
PS thanks for clearing all those new sites i recently twittered you about!
Wow I have barely been able to comment on many beta upgrades only because I have agreed with many of the improvements. I have loved Woopra. It is the best real-time Analytics program I have ever used.
I wish you the best of luck with the un-beta.
Oh and thanks to Cali Lewis who covered Wooora way back when!
John, Will there be plans for over 3M PV /mo ?
for higher traffic sites?
Regards..
Unlike many other services, this Free plan is quite decent. Great work!
I only have one request for us beta testers – don’t we deserve some kind of reward for using it in beta? Maybe stick a “Early Adopter” tag next to our usernames in the forums? :D
GC, We can support sites over 3M pv but should talk directly so send me a tell some time.
Zachary, Thank you for the great feed back and I love the idea… we love our beta testers and everyone that has made Woopra nation so great and have been actively throwing around some ways to recognize our beta testers. I won’t spill the bean yet because we all want to see another video from John =)
[...] John Pozadzides of Woopra, coming out of beta! [...]
First of all, I’d like to thank you for your great job. I love Woopra and hope to use it in the future.
These changes are expected and prices are quite reasonable.
But, the fact that you cut out SSL support on ‘Personal’ and ‘Professional’ plans is a bit disappointing. It makes these plans useless for online shops, especially for those with smaller number of visitors, as the analytics of secure pages is very important for them.
Upgrade to the next level just because of SSL is too expensive.
Cheers..
I agree. I make it a point to add SSL to all of my site, even ones that don’t sell anything, ssl is a basic security standard and you can get certs for 9.99 a year now. I would think that woopra would encourage secure practices. I don’t think that the woopra back end would see any difference in load times if the page is encrypted or not. This doesn’t seem well thought out.
Fantastic, John. Good for you and good for Woopra. Though I have a few mixed feelings.. they only come from my personal need.. not my common sense. Everything you have laid out makes good common sense and good business sense. I would not want to see Woopra fail because of the freemium model. And, I appreciate your desire to remain independent..as that is how I wish to remain as well.
How about a reseller program? I have a big mouth and a need for revenue as well. Your service is THAT valuable. Do you have a reseller program in the works…or is it already in existence and I’ve simply missed it?
GC – We do indeed have plans for users over 3M PV per month. You can contact Terry Green (terry at Woopra or @WoopraTerry for the details. We support clients with MUCH higher needs, and we’ll publish a few higher rates down the line, but our dedicated server platforms may or may not have published pricing.
Zachary – YES! I love it! We need a designation for all of our original Beta testers so that we can identifiy you forever as the ones who helped from the beginning! “Early Adopter” is ok… but we need to think about something shorter and more impactful! I’ll get the team working on this. :-D
Stizerg – I completely understand your sentiments. A small e-commerce site does indeed need SSL. And believe me, I WANT to provide it to everyone! However, we have to actually have another set of servers that handle the SSL transactions, which essentially doubles the cost on our end to support it. That doesn’t even take into account other issues, just the actual costs. So, it doesn’t make sense for us to provide SSL support unless we have a minimum price point on the customers who are using it. And $5 per month just really doesn’t cover the expense.
On a more philosophical note, and I don’t mean for this to sound as harsh as it does – so forgive me in advance, Woopra simply doesn’t have the resources to subsidize the cost of service for other businesses who don’t have the funding to do so. I mean, as you can imagine – we WANT your business. But at the same time, we have to be able to afford it.
MedXCentral – Yes! We have a program in the works. I alluded to it once or twice but haven’t yet shared any details. It’s one of our top priorities after the launch of the billing system. I want you guys to be able to earn money from referring paid users, and it will be lucrative! Stay tuned…
John P.
I really like Woopra and it’s great that you guys will start monetizing soon.. Just 2 recommendations. Make SSL support available for all plans – or at least all paid plans. I’d love to become a paid subscriber, but we can’t fork out an extra $30/mo right now due to the recession. I’m afraid we’re going to have to abandon Woopra, which I really don’t want to do. Secondly, I know why you guys are sticking to a domain rather than an account payment structure, but I think allowing a couple subdomains per account would be great. Some users have subdomains like forums. or order. Having to have 2 or 3 paid accounts for basically the same website just doesn’t work (Or open it up so the same code works on any subdomains under the primary domain).
Thanks for the consideration and for building such a great product. I wish you the very best.
[...] John Pozadzides of Woopra – Coming Out of Beta! [...]
Paul,
Not sure if you saw my comments to Stizerg previously about the SSL, but SSL really costs us more money to support it. Which is a huge problem at the $5 price point. We just can’t do it at that level.
However, your subdomain point is well taken, and I do indeed want to fiind a way to make sure we can combine those. I’ll have a talk with the team about it. Thanks for the suggestion!
John P.
John,
Perhaps, you could offer SSL suport as an additional service, for say $10, available with any plan.
It would offer more flexibility to any type of business.
John,
Woopra is certainly a great product, but without SSL on the lower plans, that certainly makes the cost of woopra unjustifiable for a small ecommerce store. I hope you can find a cheaper way to support SSL. If you do I will certainly be back as will I am sure will many others!!!
Good luck
Kevin
Thanks for all! Great service!
I agree with John, “but without ssl on the lower plans…”
Luís
I love Woopra! I hoped you’d always stay in beta…because I knew this was coming…I will keep Woopra on my sites with low traffic, and hope that one day the ones with high traffic make so much I can afford to buy it back :)
Nice Kitchen!!
Hi John,
I’ve been thinking about your statement about the cost of SSL suppport “…we have to actually have another set of servers that handle the SSL transactions, which essentially doubles the cost on our end to support it.”
On my small ecommerce website a maximum of about 3% of pageviews are SSL pages (only for checkout etc). Taking that and the fact that other web sites will have even smaller amounts of SSL pageviews or indeed none, I can’t see how it significantly increases your hardware requirements in the Woopra scale of things.
Of course its your product and you can price how you like, but I think you are going to lose a significant amount of small ecommerce customers that need Woopra to analyze their customers buying habits but cannot justify $360 a year.
Will there be a price break if you pay for the whole year at once? I know my business manager would love that.
I love Woopra! Thanks!
I think the fees are ok,but you should really up the pageviews limit a lot for each paid category.
As it is now there will be mostly 3 type of users:
1-Free users with really small website who just want to have fun once a while watching who’s online.
2-Serious users with decent websites who really cares about stats,and this kind of users will almost surely fall in professional or even more likely in business.
3-Enterprises
This mean that most of the webmasters will be paying more for woopra than the hosting itself.This is no problem for enterprises,but regular users who make websites for fun or for some small money,it will be hard to digest….
Since the storage is one of the biggest cost,why don’t you make some limit monthly storage and let the user chose the amount of historical data?
I would gladly give up many days of stats history to have a higher PV limit.
I just wanted to jump in on the SSL discussion. While I can understand the additional costs needed to support SSL, it is hard to justify $30/mo on a site that generates 40-50k pageviews. I would definitely be willing to pay a “SSL Support” addon to a lower priced package if the add-on was priced right. Obviously paying $10 for SSL for those on a $15 wouldn’t make much sense, might as well go to the next tier.
I’m hoping there will be a way to pay via a year! It’s much much easier for me to get a large university check than it is recurring monthly fee. (Using woopra for a university website)
[...] Mehr Informationen zum Ende der Betaphase gibt es im Woopra Blogeintrag von John P. [...]
Ok folks, I’m listening. Here is what I’m hearing:
1) It sounds like there may be a lot more very small sites requiring SSL support than we first imagined. I’m not sure that our first iteration of billing system will allow us to have a one time upcharge for SSL support, but I will investigate it.
It’s true that a lot of sites that need the SSL only have a small percentage of their pages going through SSL, so it doesn’t cost as much in terms of having to have as many SSL servers as regular ones. But the other costs associated with mantaining a smaller group of SSL servers and supporting the difference in the systems does have real cost as well.
Having said all of that, I’m not going to force you guys to make a decision to stay with Woopra or not over SSL support. So, I’ll talk with the team and we’ll figure something out.
2) It sounds like several people are interested in annual billing as opposed to monthly either in order to get a discount, or because it’s easier to take care of for business expensing purposes. The good news is that we do indeed have annual pre-pay coming. And you will get a very nice discount on top of the convenience should you choose to go that route!
3) A couple of folks have inquired about the monthly pageviews per plan. This is one of the biggest areas of cost research and comparison that we did, and I can say with confidence that no one in the industry can match the prices we’ve put forth. The real-time chat function alone would cost more than our entire service from several competitors.
Plus, we have a bunch of other features that we are going to be rolling out and making available directly into these paid plans in the future which will further increase the value. But we need the revenue to finish the projects, to build them in for you guys.
I know what it’s like to try and choose a billing plan. I’ve got a cell phone, cable TV, and other services like that and I always try and get the most economical one that will meet my needs. I’m just asking you guys to keep in mind that we put out the most aggressive pricing we could afford, and whichever plan you choose is helping us bring you bigger and better service. So, if you get pushed into the next tier, know that it just means we’ll appreciate you even more! :-)
John P.
PS – @sclotdebro, that is actually my home office you see in the video, not my kitchen. ;-) But I do indeed have nice built in cabinets and stuff. Cheers!
John,
Thanks for being so open about the process.
Personally, on all of my sites, the Chat function is completely unused (other than to test Woopra a couple times.) As you mentioned “real-time chat function alone would cost more than our entire service from several competitors,” I agree, but I need page views not chat (nor SSL in my case). I would rather have chat and SSL as add-ons instead of being the basis for the pricing structure.
R. Moose
Hmm, people who need chat functionality on there websites got it already. to be honest – I don’t need chat, i got one already, I need online statistics only and it is Woopra’s main function. and I’d prefer to use simple js on my website without inbuilt chat.
THIS SUCKS!!!!! Woopra was all about being FREE!!!!!
Now we have to purchase a MONTHLY PAID PLAN to support WOOPRA!!!! Come on – THINK BIG HERE!!!!!! Everybody wants FREE!!!!
WOOPRA needs to stay FREE!!!
WIKIPEDIA is doing fine, and is completely FREE!!!! LEARN from WIKIPEDIA, PLEASE!!!! PEOPLE WILL DONATE IF YOU DO IT LIKE WIKIPEDIA DOES!!!
[...] Il servizio di Woopra cerca di definirsi un modello di business [...]
[...] Our CEO, John Pozadzides, issued a video and blog post to explain what you can expect, and we invite you to spend a few minutes learning about the changes that are coming. You can find the blog post here: http://www.woopra.com/blog/2009/09/20/our-biggest-developments-since-the-initial-woopra-launch/ [...]
Good luck people.
In your email “The End of the Woopra Beta Program is Near!” I find the error – URL http://woopra.com/downloads doesn’t exist, the correct one is http://woopra.com/download
Please add the alias.
ALL my sites have less than 1k per month traffic (I’m not kidding (specialized niche)), my sites present information with no advertising or direct revenue although I earn a modest living from those whom express an ‘interest’ in working with me from these sites. $4.95 is too much for me at this time BUT I would appreciate being able to donate an amount. I class myself as a ’start up’ doing R and D. I’m impressed with what your doing AND on this page your ‘let’s flow and see’ attitude.
Congratulations for your great product!
As web design company, I recommend Woopra for all my clients. Many of these clients are businesses that are just starting at all or that are an established business, but that they are jump starting on the net.
You are right, we as users need to support Woopra, but is very complex to justify to a business owner in South America why they have to affiliate to Woopra at US$29.95 per month just because they are a business, even if they don´t have 1K of visitors per month when they are starting. US$360/year is a very small fee in North America and Europe, yet it can be a sum to consider in many countries of the third world.
I would like to suggest an alternative pricing model, based on the pageviews instead of the kind of user. Is a fact that every web owner wants that their sites grow, and I don´t think that any web owner will have problems to pay an incremental monthly fee based in the same incremental traffic they have. It would be logic to think that the more traffic that the sites get, the owner will have more money in her/his pockets and Woopra will be a more interesting tool for them as the site grows.
It also would be interesting not to limit the number of the domains that can be added to an account, because if an account has lets say 1 site with 1K visits and another has 2K as visits, the total amount of visits for that account will be 3K and that would determine the price of the monthly fee.
Again, thank you so much for this great product. I will continue using it and hopefuly I will continue recommending and installing Woopra on all the webs of my clients too.
Monica
Nicely spoken! After all the good experiences I had with the beta version, I am sure that Woopra only can become better when you charge a little bit for your great services.
Do you need the ‘professional’ account to get access to the unlimited storage?
Great pricing!
I’ll be moving all my sites from GA to an upgraded Woopra plan. I’m so bored of sharing all my data with Google, please stay independent!
[...] http://www.woopra.com/blog/2009/09/20/our-biggest-developments-since-the-initial-woopra-launch/ [...]
Hi, Great Woopra, good news the development!
I know people would love (defenitively) free Woopra, meaning totally free, and me too, even if this would be not possible.
I have to admit woopra is the best out there, but in some way it can be overpriced. I’m going to give just an example:
We run a free community in Italy, a barters community (so no much yeld in there..), we get about 20K/day pv in average and this will put us straight on Business II ‘level’ that is equal to 49.95 U$D p/m. Now, who is going to spend 599.4U$D per year on a free Site like our one?
I do think, final or not apart,woopra shall differentiate the offer.
btw Woopra it’s the best so far thanks for the service you gave us so far
Congratulations! I love the live view feature of Woopra and I like to dig in statistics, but I am one of those users that very very rarely use the chat feature, so I like the idea of being able to opt out of the chat feature to help you to come down with costs.
SSL on the other hand is of some importance for the checkout pages of ecommerce sites, so I wouldn’t want to miss this. Subdomains is another good point and I’m curious about what you’re going to come up with.
Generally I think your prices are ok, for most users certainly more expensive than hosting, but good things have their price and hey, you’re offering a free plan so stop complaining everyone. :-P
[...] vest je na zvaničnom WOOPRA blogu objavio John P. i naveo koje ce promene WOOPRA doneti svojim [...]
I have read everything, do subdomains count as the same site? Often a subdomain might end up being a conversion page, people use subdomains for translation, maybe for a forum, shopping cart, blog etc depending on the limitations of quite often the shopping cart provider etc.
Hi John
Thanks, … since day first I my main question was.. where I have to go to get a paid account.
I want to support your business because I need your services…
Said that, is quite disappointing your pricing per site and not per account. I’m not a dommainer, I have 16 registred websited right now. Some of them have less than hundred of pages per day, and some of them have some traffic, with a top of 3k page views a day. I also monitor websites of some friends to whom I provide advise.
If I have to pay 5$ per x 16 (80$) my answer will be to not track the small ones, ut if I have to pay 50$ or even 80$ to have an account where I can have up to 25 websites, and an aggregated traffic of 50k pageviews a day… most provably I will take it.
It’s not the final cost (or not only)…
It’s that I want to be treated as a single customer, not as 16… and I have have websites that have to pay, they pay for the smallest one that represents no cost to monitor.
If you want to impose me limitations on the number of websites I can add, or on the services of that can be used by the small websites.. Ok, no problem.
Anyway thanks for the great service you provide to us, and I hope us, the community will be able to finance the project so all of us can keep enjoying a great service.
Best Regards
Great video. No need to apologize regarding your performance, you did great John!
Love the service BTW, I think I’ll stay with the Free option, if my new project grows
I’m pretty sure I’ll upgrade to a paid account.
Cheers
so happy for you guys and gals! I was introduced to your service by Cali Lewis and I have been dying to get more tracking! I will be signing up for a business plan as soon as they are finalized. Since my site does between 14 and 23 million PVs a month depending on the time of year please have Larry contact me to discuss my options. I do think the $99 price point is perfect, maybe $999 a year. As a fellow startup CEO, and understanding the enormous costs you must be under, I have a few ideas..I hat e when someone says the words, “You should do….” but here is what I think “You should consider.” :)
#1- Make the chat function an option that I can open up later. Since I am sure the server costs on that are a big hit I would rather have unlimited PVs for a time, since I have creative ideas on how to use that with my sales staff, and honestly paying for an analytics service that has a cap is very counter to my needs. I imagine this would be the case with anyone over 1 million page views, so I would simplify your pricing to free for 60k or less, 9.95 for 240k or less (twice what people were getting for free) and 49.95 for a million or less. then make anything over a million $99. I do believe that any site with over a million pageviews per month that can’t see the value of your site at $99 a month is missing what is so special about Woopra.
#2- As for unlimited storage of the mounds of data you create.. I don’t think it is needed at all. As I see it, real time, full data should be stored for a month and then a very simple easy, but amazingly in depth summary could be generated for that month that would be a simple PDF taking up virtually no space at all. It would be easy to generate a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly summary sheet, along with sheets that compare those stats to the previous year’s same time frame.
#3- For those paying $99 may I suggest a service that I think would be an easy value-added function, yet inexpensive to generate. Anyone paying for your highest plan is doing so not only because Woopra is so damn cool, but because they can justify the price due to its use with advertisers. So what if you were to create a really high impact “press kit” like PDF for your customers that we could download at any time to send to potential advertisers that are looking for the latest stats of our site? That would be amazingly useful! I can’t tell you how many PDFs of google analytic webpages I am always making to send to this guy or that guy. Something like this could be easily automated and creating some sort if “Woopra Certified Stats” Pack that I could enter the email of a potential client to have it sent to would be huge on so many levels.
#4- An iphone ap to follow tracking is a must, with notifications every time your site passes pre-determined benchmarks. small sites could get pinged with a notification saying “you just hit 1,000 pageviews” while bigger sites could set it at 50k or 100k or whatever…
#5-A twitter functionality that would double as advertising (you may already have this) that auto-tweets the same sorts of things for someone. Ex: Treetop.org just surpassed 500 PVs Today according to @WoopraStats”
#6- The Pro level could allow for subdomain tracking at some less complex level. I would love for my writers to be able to see in real time only their own stats as a means of encouragement that they are getting a strong response to a story.
Anyway…just some thoughts and I look forward to sticking with you all and would even love to advert woopra on my podcasts and shows…
Ek
John,
I have a hunch that at this stage, before you’ve had chance to get a sense of who your actual customers will be, your predictions are based upon the bloggers who embraced Woopra as a free product. Your view of the market for Woopra is based upon the feedback you have received from them and you have pitched your pricing accordingly.
Unfortunately, the actual market that will emerge once you start charging will be substantially different, with substantially different needs. I suspect that your biggest mistake is in writing off people with many low-traffic websites as “domainers”. I do a lot of work with people running networks of micro-sites and I can tell you that this is, by far, the dominant way that full-time bloggers are now working – rather than focus all your writing into one domain on one broad subject, it makes more SEO sense to have several domains, each covering a much more specific aspect of the subject. For people establishing their businesses now, as opposed to those who got in two years ago, this is the only way to compete. This typically results in one person spreading their attention and support efforts over dozens of smaller sites, each with it’s own domain. Occasionally, a specific site can take off and the owner may find it to be worth her while to focus all her efforts there but, in general, these owners expand their business vertically, by continuing to grow outwards into more niche topics.
This is a legitimate practice and beneficial to users as it caters to evermore niche interests and presents vital competition to the entrenched, monolithic sites. To write it off as domaining reveals a complete disconnect from how the Web is actually growing. Yes, there are plenty of domainers out there, but they have zero interest in monitoring anything other than ad-clicks and they have no desire whatsoever to chat with their “traffic”.
By turning your nose up at legitimate micro-networks, you are passing up on the actual opportunity and focusing, instead, on one-site bloggers who have had the time and interest to play with Woopra while it was free. Most will remain free users, some will convert to paying, more will intend to but will somehow never get around to it and will soon be distracted by the next big thing. You will also find that surprisingly few of the “name” bloggers out there have enough traffic to justify your upper pricing tiers. You have essentially cornered the time-rich, cash-poor end of the market.
I understand your technical concerns, that people with hundreds of domains will bring your system to it’s knees, but you are approaching it from the wrong angle. If we are talking about genuine micro-networks run by one person, you should think of each micro-network as one big website. The only difference is that they are splitting it up among many domains – that difference, in and of itself, is merely semantic, it adds no significant burden to your system, just a few database entries. In terms of the more advanced aspects, such as chat – precisely the sort of thing that domainers have no interest in – you can easily control the extent to which this is used by limiting the number of users per account. I mean, I am presuming that you have nightmare visions of some domainer hiring an office full of Indians to spend all day chat-harassing people who are unfortunate enough to stumble upon their parking pages. Well, by allowing multiple domains but limiting it to one user, there is a finite amount of chatting that will ever happen and, frankly, unlike the one-site bloggers you are accustomed to, most people running a network of micro-sites are going to be too busy to spend much time on your advanced, resource-intensive features.
In terms of resources, the number of domains is an illusion, the only metrics that matter are overall page-views and the number of operators.
Again, I understand why you have focused on the old, one-site paradigm but it is out of step with what is actually happening out there. Ruling out the majority of the market, particularly the part with the means and the motivation to pay, could prove to be a major misstep.
John,
I think you should also add the ability for people to specify their own features for their account.
For example, A user could choose Live chat, SSL and 5k page views and would be billed for that, this would be very handy for people in certain situations.
I would upgrade to a paid plan if such a system existed for Woopra.
Cheers
Congratulations on what must have been a very long road so far.
As a contributor of ideas for improvements over time, I have been pleasantly surprised how you have taken and adopted ideas followed by a quiet roll out.
The world is moving faster and faster, and having a small, highly responsive web analytics system that is low cost and that is independent from the Big G can only be a good thing.
I build small traffic highly targetted niche lead generation sites. I have more than 50 loaded in your system. I use Woopra every day and refer to it more than email. In particular, it alerts me to leads that come into one of my clients systems. It also gives me insights into where my free search engine traffic is improving which I love!.
One of the areas that could definitely enhance the current system in the future (and I suggested some time back) is the live chat, and the individual tracking of prospects and customers. I have seen these features in my client but so far testing has shown me that the chat only works with customers on Mac’s (windows seems to block it) and the TAG feature does not remember the tag….when you refresh the name disappears. Also the “success events” does not seem to function yet…
I would be willing to upgrade to access some of the enhanced features if the current ones end up actually working once we are out of beta. However 5$ for every site would be a stretch for me right now. I would like to see a plan which would give me the highest level of analytics for my “money sites” and then basic tracking for the feeder sites where no chat would be needed (i.e. a 1 plus 4 plan).
Also, as a data freak, being able to export the data to excel (like GA) seems to me to be essential.
Since some of the markets I am in are cyclical, I also agree that you need to consider adding a plan for those who need to include the data for longer than 90 days…imagine a user who is in a market that flowers only once a year or for a certain part of the year (like travel and gifts) …..or at least have a data export option….for offline analysis and comparison inside my woopra client & excel.
Google finances their expansion through monetization in other areas….I am wondering if there is not a way that some of these needs could be covered through ……is there really no deal that could be struck with the quality hosting companies ? i.e. hosting there includes Woopra analytics..?
Having said all this, I have been expecting this moment to come for some time and I wish you continued success.
Craig
why not bundle domains into packages like ClickTales does?
it does not make sense to offer plans per domain base. since if I check and monitor my customers web acsess, I’m looking forward to use the tool for all of my domains.
Should of had the loyalty program made a long time ago… I have referred over 100 website owners to woopra. Im not going to get credit for any of that.
I ALWAYS HAVE SAID: THE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE HAVE SENSE OF THE HUMOR. CONGRATULATIONS AND GOOD LUCK.
Fidel Hormazábal Lorca
@donnacha raises a good point. Perhaps a plan for those businesses out there that run many small, focused websites with low traffic per site? A bit like Mint will allow you to use their solution to monitor your sites as long as they are all in one place (much as you would monitor subdomains).
Those businesses are certainly not going to pay $150/month to track ten small sites.
I second radmoose…
I use woopra for statistic only and i will put chat and ssl support as addons. That could set the price lower. And i can guess that only a current minority uses that two features.
By the way, i love woopra and im an active supporter, spreading the voice any time i got the oportunity.
And to the guy called Tim, man, chill out… yes everyone wants everything to be free, but you do not get any food for free? or do you?… this is bussiness, what we need is to focus how we use woopra, what could we suggest to add or remove from the free service and how to get creative to lower the price for small and mid size packages.
Thanks
Woopra is a great product and genuinely useful, so I will choose one of the paid options. But what about sites that exceed 3m page views per month?
Thanks John for this great job… I love Woopra..
Hi John, sorry about the sincerity (and for my bad English), it found the value (cost) high for the reality of my country (Brazil).
If the pageviews of the table were not for months but by DAYS, oh yes, prices would be nice (more fair) and I (and many people I know) certainly would catch a plane “Professional”, the more you continue on this path (cost) have to
up.
Anyway, thanks for all service up here!
Hugs and good luck in this new stage.
Raphael Vieira
Wow. Fantastic responses from everyone! I wish I could reply to all of you, but it’s just impractical in this setting.
Please know however that we are listening and actively evolving the model. Your feedback, combined with the empirical data we gather from the system does indeed matter. I cannot stress enough how seriously we are taking all of these decisions. And I believe this discussion thread accurately illustrates the issues we face in attempting to decide how best to move forward. For example:
And we’re getting the same feedback privately that we are seeing here in the comments.
Several people have suggested that we break certain features out of the pricing plans. In fact, there are those suggesting that we essentially turn the service into an a-la-carte pricing model. We’re simply not going to do it this way because it over complicates things for the user. In addition, by stripping core features from the service we dilute the value it brings and we would essentially create a system that stifles innovative feature development. We would never add a feature unless “everyone” was going to use it.
We will not do that. Quite the opposite, as new specialized feature requests come in, we will continue to add that functionality so that Woopra has a little bit of something for everyone in addition to the strong core feature set. You will see an example of this very soon…
Also, I’ve talked to a lot of people in the last two years who were simply unaware of how to make use of some of the features. But once it was explained to them, they became hooked on a previously ignored option.
So, I will investigate every single suggestion here, and take them into consideration before we announce our final pricing model. Thanks to EVERYONE for taking the time to share your opinions. We sincerely appreciate it!
Cheers,
John
I had a discussion this week with friends whether paid internet services could be a great succes in times where everything is for free. What’s the use of putting a toillet on a beach while the biggest one, the ocean, is in front of your nose? Well, if the service has great advantages it’s worth the price I think. In my opinion i’m convinced that Woopra is more accurate than Google Analytics and offers more detailed information. I’m glad I used it in the past and I will be happy to use it in the future. I wish you guys all the best!
ps: There’s only one thing that never seems to work with me and that’s the chatting stuff with visitors :(
Data Greetings from Belgium
MaT
Hi John,
Thanks to Cali Lewis, we found and joined Woopra a while ago. Since it really seems like you are reading and considering the comments here (which, as a user, I really appreciate), I thought I’d add to the comment pool and write in my vote on a few issues.
You were thinking of a designation for Woopra beta members – how about “Woopra Originals”?
I’m in the camp that believes that there needs to be some ability for all levels of service to monitor multiple subdomains of any main domain being monitored by the account. Subdomains of the main domain should be included automatically. If there is a concern that domainers or some other type of user could abuse this, then limit it to something like 5 or 10 subs. That is more than enough for a non-abusive user and probably unusable for someone looking to abuse the service.
All levels of service should have multiple domain management included. Again, limits like 5 or 10 (even on a free account) seems like plenty for a “normal” user and way too few for any type of abuse to be perpetrated.
Theoretically speaking the I believe the relationship should be 1 account to many domains, not many domains each to one account.
With the resource impacts you describe for SSL support, I think the best way to go would be to allow all levels of service to add SSL support for a nominal monthly fee or a one-time setup (resource allocation) fee. Since there are a lot of little sites out there that may use SSL for one reason or another, maybe the amount of that fee should be commensurate with the impact on your system.
I really appreciate services that accomodate new, small, and start-up businesses. For someone trying to start up a new business on the web, even 4.95/mo can be a lot. I understand that if someone else is making money and using your service, that you should be making some money too and I agree. But perhaps a token account fee with the same level of service as free would be better? If a business is just starting out, your service can help them grow. The various limitations built into your pricing model already would force someone with a successful and growing business to upgrade from level to level as they grow. So realistically, it’s not like someone on a $1.95/month token business account could really be earning all that much anyway. And when they do start to become successful, that would be born out by increased page views, etc, leading to service level upgrades. If you’re going to offer free accounts at all (which I think is great), then getting $1.95/mo for that same level of service from a small business (and again, if the free level of service can meet their needs, how much biz could they really be doing?) is icing, right?
I think the storage issue should be a complete NON-issue. If that is where a lot of the cost comes from, then give folks an opportunity to easily download (1-click) ALL the information in their account. I’d HAPPILY get down to 30 or 60 days of online storage (possibly less) if I could easily get all of my info off your servers and reduce my monthly bill by 30%, 40%, 50% or more. If the storage impact is as great as it seems based on other comments, then this would be a game (and pricing) changer. ESPECIALLY since storage is sort of a fixed resource – the service provider (Woopra) either buys the capacity or doesn’t – if you buy it and it doesn’t get used, then you’ve still paid for it – unlike more variable costs like perhaps bandwidth? (I don’t run an internet service provider so I’m guessing a bit here.). But if your subscribers can tell you that they’d rather not have you provide them with as much storage, then you don’t have to allocate them space and your capital/fixed cost investment could be lower than it otherwise would be.
(By the way, I love that Woopra has a chat feature built in.)
Thanks for considering your users’ opinions and ideas. And best of luck and good fortune going off beta. We’ve been happy to participate in the process.
Cheers,
Buck
Congratulations
Having seen prices charged for similar services I can say I’m plesantly surprised at the price you are pitching this at. Some of the poster have suggested thing like chat should be optional and I agree with that, I’ve not used used chat so far but may do in the future.
I would like to see the affiliate/refer program implemented soon though, it would give us all a chance to earn some commisions to pay for our own fees
regards
Having seen a number of these sorts of announcements and seen various sides of the argument with opensource, community sites, software and more, over the past 8+ years, I have a few nuggets of wisdom to pass on to you at Woopra and also to those who’ve complained about the cost for their “null income” sites.
First Woopra…
I’d tend to agree with the points raised and acknowledged about low income/turnover e-commerce sites as I’m erm.. biased ;) One key component of any developing e-commerce site is going to be the application of tracking data to improve the product range, site content, etc… but without SSL for those all important checkout processes up pops the warning (about unsecure content), increasing the number of abandoned carts (lower sales, etc..) and immediately puts the e-comm owner on the back foot. In a cyclical fashion you then essentially shoot the golden goose or at least reduce its corn feed so it produces less eggs.
The solution so far suggested of an add-on or bolt-on would seem to resolve the key issues and if I’m right I suspect the folks who will pay for this will end up eventually needing higher costing accounts. In essence what folks are suggesting is more of a symbiotic relationship, one that benefits everyone :)
Now for the “null income” brigade.
With the best will in the world, I have to question your economic model. If you are running a site that racks up a 400K monthly page visit you are almost certainly in a position to put a small “donate” button on key pages or start including a small amount of advertising to help pay the bills. If your site is of value you will almost certainly recoup the costs and quite possibly more that can be plowed into other useful tools to benefit your community of viewers and/or members.
You have to remember that if you are not already charging then it’s almost certain that your site audience provide you with the motivation you need to keep your site running. However Woopra do not have that same connection with them. As a result expecting, or in fact, demanding (as some have) Woopra to foot the bill for something they derive no benefit from, is unrealistic and not particularly well thought out.
I know folks will probably (definitely?) disagree with me but I have an analogy for you. Imagine walking down a street with a bag of chips (French fries to those of you in the States) where every other person is asking you for a chip, just one chip… and this street has 500 people on it! Are you going to go hungry just because everyone says it’s a “nice” thing to do?
Not hardly…
@Tim: Thanks for not allowing this comment thread to miss out on the default freeloading idiot who thinks that Free is their birthright and we should wipe your backside for you. You won’t be missed… LOL
Cheers John… I’ll await your final decisions with interest.
@Monica – I think there was some confusion. Businesses do not have to choose the “Business package”. We just request that they use any of the paid accounts. I think we’re going to have to rename the packages so as to avoid confusion. But to be clear, a business can use the $4.95 plan so long as the features meet their needs.
@Tim – Why do I get the feeling that you would not be the first to volunteer to “donate” to help support Woopra. ;-) No matter! You may have misunderstood what I was saying, but your site will still be free based on the usage.
@ctrld – Thanks for the tip! I’ve put a temporary fix in place for people who followed the broken link. I very much appreciate the pointer.
@lorenzocoffee – I am truly glad you are enjoying Woopra! Thanks for the great feedback. Now let me turn things around and ask a couple of questions:
1) With that kind of page view level, why don’t you monetize it? There must be affiliate programs, google ads, etc. that would allow you to earn a reasonable amount.
2) Considering that your site generates signifigant load on the Woopra system, I must ask what pricing you would suggest to be fair?
@joduba – In looking at your account, you will be much better off paying individually, because most of your sites will fall into the free pricing tier anyway. We don’t want to limit anyone’s ability to add sites. You can have 100 or more! :-)
@eklund – Thanks very much for the suggestions. Terry and I will contact you privately to follow up. Cheers!
@donnacha – I agree that we expect to see changes in the customer base after launch. I was not implying that people with several low volume sites were domainers. I was literally referring specifically to “domainers”. No one else. Believe me, I do not “turn my nose” up to ANY one. Especially not customers. :-)
@Craig Sunney – We have big plans for improvement in the Chat area that I think you’ll like. It’s high on the list once we are monetizing. As far as your 50 sites are concerned, I would not ask you to pay $5 per month for each. If they are very low usage, they could probably all remain on the free plan. Perhaps you could upgrade just a few to help our revenue generation needs?
@zmb – Our expectation is that if you have customers you need to monitor, you would have them sign up their own domain – which they should be owning and controlling any way. Then, they can use the “share” feature to share access with you. Also, for folks like yourself, we will have an affiliate program which rewards you for making these referrals soon.
@matthew – We appreciate ALL of your love and referrals! If it’s any consolation… we haven’t made any money off of them either. ;-) Hopefully we can make some together in the coming future.
@Matt – We prefer to help people with over 3M page views per day individually. We have much higher usage plans, so just message me and I’ll put you in touch with a team member for assistance.
Again, thanks for all the responses everyone!
John P.
@Buck S – “Woopra Originals” Oh, I like that. ;-)
– I’m in agreement with everyone on the sub-domains. We are actively seeking a solution for this problem now.
– The data retention issue is not quite that simple. Our advanced reporting depends on the storage of the data. After a year, I guarantee you are going to want to run our advanced segmentation reports, as they will be the most valuable feature of our service to tell you things that no one else can, and that you could not analyze using Excel…
@Martin – Thanks for your hearty vote of confidence. I share your views 100% and appreciate them very much. As far as SSL is concerned, we are going to try and accommodate it for every paying user. I’m just working on the details now.
Cheers,
John P.
John, thank you so much for your explanation, is very useful.
Reading all the post, I think that many Woopra users are in Craig´s conditions, including me.
You wrote:
“@Craig Sunney – We have big plans for improvement in the Chat area that I think you’ll like. It’s high on the list once we are monetizing. As far as your 50 sites are concerned, I would not ask you to pay $5 per month for each. If they are very low usage, they could probably all remain on the free plan. Perhaps you could upgrade just a few to help our revenue generation needs?”
What is the amount of traffic that you consider is “very low usage” in a website so, even if it is a business you allow them to be in the free plan under the conditions you describe above?
I really would love to support Woopra in that way that you described to Craig.
Monica
Monica, Craig, et. al.
To some people, the world is very black and white. To those people I would say the following, “Woopra asks that ALL businesses choose a paid plan. Any plan.”
To other people, myself included, the world is all about shades of gray. For those people I would suggest the following. If you have a “business” site that is only just getting established and you have neither a lot of traffic, nor any revenue with which to help support Woopra, perhaps you can use the Free plan initially. However, if it was me, I would also keep in mind that another person is footing the bill for my benefit, and I would look for other ways that I could add value to an otherwise one-sided relationship. For example, giving routine feedback and encouragement to the development team here, helping to spread the word through referrals, creating blog posts with tutorials about how to get the MOST out of using Woopra, etc.
As I said previously, we are not going to police our user base. I am only asking that you do the right thing, and use common sense when approaching the topic of your Woopra usage.
Thanks for the opportunity to serve you!
John P.
John
This is a cool thread. I keep coming back to see the different perspectives, and qudos to you for responding
to the points personally.
I definitely believe it would be a smart move to include all SSL on all paid plans as @Martin and other suggested.
As small home based niche sites start to gather vogue and momentum, this really ads extra punch and a “reason why”
to the “upgrade to paid” step.
I concurr that keeping the plans a simple as possible to understand by including all/most features for paid plans and
varying pricing only on usage makes the most sense….any time I see a paid offer, these are always the easiest to
understand and step forward with.
The advanced segmentation features you mooted at sound awesome….
On the last post regarding different world views, I suspect that 80%-90% of the contribution towards your revenue positive
status (and ability to develop Woopra further) is going to come from 10-20% of your core user. It may make sense to
sound them out separately (I’,m sure you have a way) before setting your decision in stone. Just a thought.
Anyway count me in.
Kudos, kudos, kudos. You guys are TOTALLY doing this right. I was an eMusic subscriber (note, was!) who got caught up in their recent debacle over price plan changes. Woopra gets it – you are up front, clear in your needs to stay sustainable, MORE than fair, and giving us ample time to make a decision that benefits everyone. Excellent work, and excellent post. Rest assured I will defeinitely be referring people to Woopra, not only for the fabulous product you’ve created, but also the graceful, diplomatic way you’re handling your transition. Yes! :-)
John-
You handled this very well, which is more than can be said about some of the people who have posted comments here!
I am one of the users who probably has not utilized all of the features Woopra offers, but what I have used has convinced me that Woopra is worth paying for. I’m in! Where do I send my check?
Ummm. I REALLY hate the idea about ditching the data over 90 days. Nor any time. Data is important, especially for analytics. Imagine being an ecommerce business owner. You would like to know the past 5 years of data because your about to go IPO. Or your a large small business trying to discover industry trends.
I like where your headed and I hope you have great success in developing this paid model but please understand that for certain businesses, those that care about “crunching the numbers”, will need data past 3,6,12 months. Maybe a fee system for those type of companies? I don’t know but please please don’t just throw away the data! :(
@Jerry Kidd, I agree with you. John has handled this transition in a fantastic way.
@Craig, Michelle, Jerry & myloeb – Thanks so much for the kind words. We appreciate your support more than you know!
@Joshua – I agree with you about the importance of long term data storage. As someone who runs and has run a business for many years that depended on stats, I can’t imagine ever discarding a number. However, there are tens of thousands of users who have blogs or other situations where they don’t ever care to really look at the data after a certain period of time. And in an effort to keep costs low, we need to limit the retention on those plans.
If you will all humor me for a moment, let me give you an analogy to data retention…
I think about the people who work at the local animal shelter when I think of our data. You have people who love animals, and dedicate their lives to them. But they have to take in so many stray animals that there literally isn’t room for them all. So, they try and get people to adopt the animals, but in the end some have to be euthanized. This is how I feel about destroying data. I don’t want to do it. But I need people to help pay to maintain it.
Now, back to the explanation. One other thing I should be clear about is that we have the opportunity to archive data in two different ways. One way is a purely static manner. For example, you had X hits in January. That number will never change. Another method of storage however maintains every piece of data, and it’s relation with every other piece. This is what allows the advanced segmentation that most of our users have yet to really discover or take advantage of.
In the end, I think we can maintain some static historical data for a long, long time. But that is boring “me too” information, and it would be missing out on the vital individually searchable data that segmentation analysis can provide. It is THIS data that we are trying to maintain for as long as possible for each of our clients.
Cheers,
John P.
I have a for-fun music blog on Blogger, it’s a personal blog for music lovers. I get 250,000 page views monthly. Does your free plan for personal use stop at 30K PVs? If so I’m not able to come up with $360/yr to track my visitors. Looks like I have to switch to Google Analytics, right?
That’s a very good move from Woopra. I am waiting for making use of the next features.
[...] Woopra » Blog Archive » Our Biggest Developments Since the Initial Woopra Launch [...]
Amazing, Congratulations! Just don´t like the limits of free acount but, it´s the nature of free
cheers :D
Nice work – We will support your plans and get on a paid plan from day 1;-)
John I know you don’t want to break things up, but here is a suggestion anyway
A fee for a plan
An additional fee for each additional domain on the plan ($1 for first 10 then $0.50 thereafter)
You will have problems with billing on Paypal with this method, because you would need adaptive payments, a new subscription for $0.50 $1 when someone adds a domain just isn’t very useful.
The plans could include a certain number of domains free
Someone with 100 small sites on various platforms might not even use up the full allocation of a Business II plan in traffic, but their money site can probably cope with just a business I plan or less if you move the line for SSL.
You list 12 months of data retention but 24 or 36 is desirable to compare and I am sure those lines can move over time.
Suggesting someone with 100 sites might use free plans and pay for a big one means they lose the seasonal data they need from their network effect.
Instead of a Pro Plan for $15 or a Business I plan for $30 plus loads of free plans that same customer could end up paying (and be happy about it)
Business II $50 (10 free domains)
10 domains @ $1 = $10
80 domains @ $0.50 = $40
TOTAL = $100/month
They may not use up even half their pageview budget, so they may be able to scrape by with a Business I and pay you $80/month
You know the dedicated hosting game, there is good money in the add-ons
Something I have wanted to achieve for a long time is a cost effective way to measure and analyse the movement of traffic across a network of sites. Maybe Woopra will eventually be a good solution for this, but you first of all need to see that there are enough clients who could benefit with large networks.
Just one other note: I often see people asking for Woopra on WordPress.com – the problem is Woopra on WP.com is almost certainly going to be free accounts – does it make any sense to pursue WP.com at all? Anyone using their VIP service could probably use Woopra anyway.
@AndyBeard: Thanks for the input. We’ve been in talks with WordPress.com from the beginning and have some ideas being tossed back and forth. The rest of your suggestions are great. We’re considering many of these as we push and shove around ideas with our team. Glad to know that we’re thinking alike. :D
When Will the Paid Plan Start?
We are overwhelmed with input coming in from various sources. We’re reading through everything and discussing every option and idea, so keep them coming, but this does delay our plans on launching the paid versions, which is good for our current beta testers. We’ll let you know when we are ready since we are taking this very seriously and considering it our biggest experiment. Expect changes along the way, too.
I have only used woopra for a short time and my final stage website is just about to go live in the next couple of weeks – Iwill definitly upgrade – what a great service.
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When can we upgrade to a payed version?
Just started to use Woopra och I’m already addicted =). And I want to support this and pay for a business solution.
I think it’s great to get a better product. I consider myself lucky to have been in the Beta program and find that Woopra works great. Me, I am just your part time blogger, have a couple of sites that I am using woopra on and love it for the information it provides and I know I am not using the Beta to it’s fullest possibilities. I’ll be looking to upgrade when the time is right.
Keep up the great work guys!!!
[...] service looks like? Check out Woopra’s CEO John P. video and blog post announcing that his popular website analytics service is going out of beta. With no seed capital in the bank to keep the service free, Woopra is ready to start monetizing [...]
Muchas Felicidades desde México este es un servicio que definitivamente vamos a adquirir. (Congratulations from Mexico, this is a service that we definatelly will have in our business and we are glad to pay for it because it delivers what we need in a real time frame).
Just want to say thank you for your effort. I have a wonderful expericence using beta edition.
First off, just want to say we’re big fans of the service and congratulations on your success.
In terms of charging and structuring, I agree with the many comments presented that the current rate model is onerous – paying to use the service isn’t the issue for us, but paying the rate we would have to pay for each of our internal websites would be a lot. A fairer method would be to have a business account rate range, i.e.: $29.95/mo for up to 5 websites, $39.95 for 6-10 and 59.95 for 10+ or something to that effect. I would also set the maximum users a little higher – say 15 – with no limit to the number of page views. We have 4 websites, all of which have the same 3 administrators and each site would have 5-10 unique users.
The chat is not an issue for us but the SSL is as well.
This is what we would be looking for to make Woopra an analytics tool we would definitely add to our arsenal.
Great news. Certainly I will be one of the users to pay for Woopra.
My only doubt is about the time of stay data, I saw the response of john talking about some annual fee to retain data for longer but I think it would be interesting to think of backup functionality in excel format or something like that included plans paid.
(Sorry my english)
look paying 5 or 10 $ a month wouldnt be much of a deal, but for each site its a bit expensive say i have 10 sites it would be 149$ a month and if i need ssl it would be the double price. i love woopra but i certainly can’t aford that..
Good news. We will continue to use woopra and convert to a paid plan. It’s been a great tool that’s not only useful, but fun!
wow – finally made my way through this long (and growing thread).
@Woopra thank you for the initiative that your team have taken in “Opening my eyes” to what is happening on our sites. We do not consider “chat” as an important feature as it is “privacy intrusive” and will very rarely be used – we are looking at creating a support page that when people land we can react with a chat (but that is pie in the sky stuff). Of highest concern is SSL price is not an issue what i am more concerned about and have not seen is how Woopra and my team will transition from Beta to Live environment without any impact on current site users and statistics.
@Those wanting strong features for free. I agree with some others in here many cases appear to be blogs and micro sites or lead generating sites in which case it is hardly Woopra role to subsidise your business model. If you choose to not advertise and not generate revenue then you can not expect service providers to carry your business. These businesses have options.
1. Change your business model to revenue stream positive
2. Build the cost of Woopra into your overheads (you can offset that with local tax laws or fees where applicable)
3. Change your expectations
4. Calculate your cost per benefit (Business 101) – This means look at the cost of Woopra and evaluate whether it saves you money else where (SEO, Support, Overheads etc) to justify the cost. If not then your not a match but have the free option. If it is saving elsewhere then great take it up/
5. In many cases we are talking some sites not being able to afford the cost. Simplify the cost – if you give up 1 coffee a day not only is it healthier for you but guess what – you can see the lovely Woopra interface for all of its splendour! If you cant afford $1 a day then you need to decide whether you are a true Online Business
6. Those people concerned about paying for the SSL from what we now with the triggers and events I believe there is nothing stopping you from “thinking outside of the box” and creating event notifications for outgoing pages that are https. This will give you every indication of how many exit to those pages (need to have this validated by team Woopra though)
In summary Woopra love your work and brace yourself for a new world of pain – but I am sure your team will manage. We are a strong site with 2000 paying customers per day through 1 website – all pages on SSL – so the decision is an easy one – we offset the cost and where it as the trade off to visibility, SEO and others is a major plus. I have gnashed my teeth at times questioning whether this service targets the blog market or the commercial market. The answer is a rising commercial. You can not please everyone all of the time but your efforts to do so are admirable. With eager anticipation we wait to be a Woopra Pioneer on the wild wild west front of the Internet world. The wagons are chained up and the horses are ready to go. Cash Flow neutral let it ride!
@Craig Sunney –
This is known as the Paretto Principal. 80% of your income will be borne by 20% of your clients. It can also be applied to costs (based on our experience) that 80% of your support costs will be caused by 20% of your clients.
That is exactly why Woopra need to take a clear commercial position early – to reduce support and overheads whilst trying to move towards a cash neutral role.
Further consider this food for thought:
That SSL certs can be of many colours, shapes and sizes.
1. SSL that is common is the shared SSL issued of a Shared Server at a total cost of $1 – $9 per month. These certificates are there to give site owners a sense of security and feel good virtual hug to visitors that their privacy is at hand.
2. Stand Alone SSL certs that cost around $180 – $800 pending what you need and these are applied to mostly virtual or a % dedicated servers (monthly cost $80 – $400)
3. Others have the big gun SSL’s – mother of them all – that cost >$1400USD and allow SSL on subdomains – wildcards etc. These often sit on Dedicated Servers – Web Clusters or CDN’s (with a monthly cost of $400+)
Now those people wanting to see SSL need to consider what type of SSL they have and how much they are paying for it. If it is a shared SSL then it is unreasonable to expect the Woopra service to be applied across all plans to cater for these type of certs. Yet if your business or site has forked out good $ for the other 2 SSL types it is an easy consideration to justify a suitable plan to give full visibility to behaviour within “my nice secured environment sitting on my cluster” that costs an arm and a leg.
PS Affiliate Program options
Give me a white label – referral program – that can be integrated into my portal (API) and I will be happy to push your great service out to my clients (Telcos, ISPs) as a new revenue stream.
May I use the free version of Woopra even if I place advertising on my blog? It does make some bucks but it doesn’t earn me a living.
nothing stopping you there Stefan. It would appear that the only limitations Woopra have around the free accounts is based on PV and other addon services not your revenue stream. But what an idea! Team Woopra split advertising revenue with those not wanting to pay for their plans!!
@woopra – been thinking about this for a while… my initial thought was that I’d fit into the ‘personal’ category and was fine with that… but in thinking/analyzing my traffic a bit more, I see that 100k/month probably won’t hold me (I’m averaging about 4k hits a day) and the next step up is a bit of a jump. I’m wondering if there wouldn’t be a 1/2 way point between those two points… I don’t need 3 users, I don’t really need 12 months of storage (if I need longer stats I guess I can look at that free google thing LOL), but what I do need is more than 100k/month.
Either way, I’ll be signing up for my main blog and the other sites will thankfully stay in the freebie category.
Thanks for the opportunity to speak out.
Great, I will most certainly upgrade to the personal plan. I have a question though, Are the prices in USD or CAD and what payment methods will their be available? I use PayPal for all my online purchases so it would be a real kick in the pants if that wasn’t an option. Either way great work guys!
I just felt the need to add, the tim wanting free for ever isn’t the same Tim as this one, who first questioned pricing plans.
I have read through the replies and the feature which has come up a few times, is chat, as a bolt on. I also noted ssl as a bolt on, but that doesn’t apply to me, so I can’t comment.
But I can say, chat is not something I have ever used, nor would want to use.
I totally understand the ‘not making an a la carte menu’. For beta users, it is easy enough to get to grips with the features, but in 6 months time, a new person running in to Woopra, won’t know necessarily what bolt on to have or to leave, so could easily miss the real benefits of Woopra. Plus the associated internal nightmares of deciding what is a reasonable bolt on price.
That said, historical data, on a personal perspective is vital. One of my newer sites is a music blog and I use this data to as part of the numbers in creating a weekly, monthly and will be annual top 50 band chart, so I need that data. I would in an ideal world, prefer not to be subsidising the chat users for my data, but perhaps they are subsidising my data with their chat. So I take the numbers on the basis of what bang do I get for my buck. The numbers look pretty good, although as someone else commented, they actually are more pricey than my monthly hosting fees and domain renewal put together, but that isn’t Woopras issue, that is mine.
I also agree with the comment on being able to download data as ’static numbers’ to pass on to potential advertisers.
I do however, absolutely agree with those who are in the same camp as myself (strange that), that one account many domains, is a far more effective pricing plan for many of us. I guess however this puts constraints on future Woopra plans.
I personally would be happier paying US$20 – US$25 a month to be able to retain 12 months data for 5 sites, than US$15 for one site and loose the data for the other 4 after 90 days. I do also undersand this then confuses are the page views split per domain or should I be able to get the same number of page views for every site etc. etc.
As I said on my first entry, I am happy to run with Woopra however it pans out (around the prices already indicated) and if I don’t like it, well there is always the option to not renew my subscription.
It is great to see a company so open on an issue like this.
Here’s to Woopras future financial viability. Then when you are making ‘too much profit’, we can come back to the pricing plan structures again :-) I am sure that is a problem you would like to be in a position to wrestle over and you guys certainly deserve to get to that position with the work and time you have put in to the beta.
.
Re: Tim… I did spot that and was referring to the rather obvious spoilt childlike individual rather than the more constructive one. Apologies if I inadvertently insulted the wrong one.
no problem at all. I knew to whom you were refering. Just wanted to clear my name :-)
Well, im a 17 year old who runs a Halo PC Clan, we get about 200,000 page views a month!!!!
Not so sure i can afford, that plan : (
@william – As John said above, have you considered Google Ads or something of the like to cover some of your woopra costs?
@woopra – I am thoroughly impressed with your business strategy and listening to the users concerns instead of instantly writing them off. It is nice to see a company have an open forum with it’s users and try to offer the best options to help cover the majority of their concerns.
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The ads in woopra are quite subtle but for me they are still a bit annoying, could the people who have a payed plan have a ad free woopra?
yes please
@Alex: When we have a paid plan and people paying, those paying for the plan with no ads will get no ads. We’ve worked very hard to make the ads be as unannoying as possible, which has actually cost us ad revenue since they are almost invisible. :D We’re doing our best, but that’s for your support for ourselves and our sponsors who help keep the lights on so far.
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Oh man am I gon’a pay? Oh yes I sure am, I’m gon’a use this thing professionaly. I’m on paidplan from day 1!
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I signed up for woopra and was told there was a long wait. Now I have received this video. Does this mean I will soon be eligible for the woopra service? If so, I’m so excited. I’ve been blogging since July and ONE of my blogs has received over 1,000 out of the 3,500 visits. I’m dying to see if I can find out where it’s posted that is continues to receive so many visits every day. Do I need to resign up? I’m not opposed to the $5 plan but I’d like to try out the free service for a while first. I’m retired and have to watch the $5 $10 etc spendings because they soon add up to a big chunk. Thank you for this service. I found out about it through a friend and will be more than happy if I get it to recommend it.
There is no wait time now. If you got the newsletter, you are signed up. We activated all of our beta testers who were waiting for approvals a while ago. Unfortunately, the site you added was a WordPress.com site. Woopra only works with self-hosted versions of WordPress. Woopra will not work with WordPress.com as stated in our not-so-fine print.
Login to your Members Area and Edit the settings to change the site to the one you wish to be tracked. Hopefully, not one on WordPress.com. :D
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