Update (16/11/16): The new pricing plans have been rolled out. To purchase the new plans, you will have to update your IWP Panel to v2.10.0. Pricing plans reflects the suggestions received in the comments section.
The InfiniteWP team has been working their ass off for the last few months and it has been quite exhausting. With feature requests, bug fixes and project deadlines to meet, it felt like the team was rushing to fulfill the temporary goals without a clear vision for the future of InfiniteWP. So we thought it would be great to take a couple of days off from our daily routine to refocus and strategize on the course that InfiniteWP will take going forward. This was a much needed break for the entire team to look back on the journey, the mistakes we made and to realign ourselves with InfiniteWP as our priority. Not that we weren’t aligned earlier, it’s just that as a young product company sometimes it felt like we were stuck with age old InfiniteWP and we wanted to be one of those young kids on the block playing with fancy new gadgets rather than playing with vintage toys.
Our experiments with Pricing InfiniteWP
Having been in the WordPress community for over 5 years now, there hasn’t been much of a change in terms of pricing for the last 4 years since we launched the Addon Suite on the 12th of September 2012. We grappled quite a bit with pricing the Addon Suite during the initial year and with a ton of experiments like pricing the suite for $999, $799 and so on, we ended up at $399 for the initial year and $199 for yearly renewals. It has been like that for the past 4 years now. Same applies for the Enterprise Solution too, $399 for the first year followed by renewals at $199 every year.
Addon Suite Mini Launched
We launched a smaller version of the Addon Suite called the Addon Suite Mini on 24th of September 2015 and priced it at $199 with renewals at $99. But we did not make any noise about this launch or do any sort of promotions. Our intention was to cater to an audience that were managing a lower amount of websites but our insecurity and the fear of losing revenue got the better of us. This page was available on our website and is still is but we would only talk about this to customers that requested a lower pricing plan or pitch it to users that were managing fewer than 20 sites and weren’t renewing the full Addon Suite. We gave it a sort of step motherly treatment where the Addon Suite and the Enterprise Solution got a full banner on our addons page whereas the Addon Suite Mini was and is still nowhere to be found :’(
InfiniteWP taking a stand on Traditional Discounts
Around December last year, we as a team had a bit of change in our conviction about running sales and offering discounts during the holiday season. Running sales and discounts meant that we were diluting the value of our products so we spoke about value exchange, customer loyalty and being fair to our users but on another level we also spoke about the dip in revenue for the next few months which was undesirable. We decided to entirely scrap the system of giving discounts on our products traditionally and even otherwise. Educational discounts, NGO’s and Not for Profit organizations still qualified for discounts.
An effort to correct our unintentional Sales Tactic
We stopped doing promotions as it would reduce the perceived value of our products but we were pricing our addons $1 lesser than its worth at $49, $69, $99 and $399. Although unknowingly, we have been employing a very popular sales tactic through the years called the left digit effect. We wanted to correct this since we weren’t okay with this. We changed the prices of our addons to $50, $70, $100 and $400, our revenue immediately dropped by almost 20%. Our insecurities came running back to us exactly the speed at which our revenues dropped and our belief of not using a sales tactic immediately took the back seat. We convinced ourselves that we are too small a company to make a difference by not using these gimmicks so we reverted back to our original pricing and our revenue slowly started climbing up again 🙂
Our 5th Year Anniversary Sale
Though InfiniteWP was officially launched in April 2012, our star seller, the Addon Suite debuted only in September 2012. As the Addon Suite entered its 5th year this month, we wanted to do something special for our users who have been with us through thick and thin and helped us reach this stage. We genuinely wanted to give back something to the community. As a token of gratitude we ran a flat 50% sale for our loyal users during the anniversary week. This sale wasn’t one of those traditional holiday discounts, which by the way we are still against. We will not be running any more sales until we need to actually thank our users for pushing us to create great products.
What happened on our weekend getaway?
The plans that we made at our short business retreat are amazing. We’ve got some really cool insights on what we were lacking, what could have been done differently, what we intend to change for the future and so on. I don’t intend to bombard you with details about everything that we decided in one blog post so let me start with one of the most important decisions now and leave the others for later. As the title suggests, we plan on introducing tiered pricing for InfiniteWP. This has been something that we wanted to do for a long time but normal humans that we are, we were afraid of change. We feared how our users are going to perceive this change. We feared that by offering lower plans we may end up losing our revenue. In the process we were being unfair to our users by pricing our Addon Suite at $399. As a user, if you manage 20 sites you pay $399, if you manage 200 sites you pay $399 and if you manage 2000 sites you still pay $399. We are not okay with that so we have something exciting for you. 😀
The magical $99 number
The Anniversary sale gave us some new insights and brought a lot of genuine feedback from our users. This also gave us a platform to understand what our users really want and where they fit in. We have been receiving requests for quite some time now to introduce tiered pricing. We analysed other plugins and products in the WordPress market and got to a conclusion that $199 was an amount which everyone was comfortable paying. No matter what the purpose or the complexity of the product, $199 was the most popular pricing plan. Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, name any product and they had their best seller priced at $199. Even when we ran our sale, the most sold product was the Addon Suite at $199 followed by the Addon Suite Mini at $99, both after 50% discount.
We felt that it would be better to introduce plans at lower prices that will allow us to reach more of the WordPress community. This way our sales will remain consistent rather than spiking during the offer period and dropping drastically when the offer got over. I present to you our new pricing plans that will allow you to pay as you go. You no longer have to pay for the full Addon Suite if you are managing 20 or 40 sites. We have separate plans for each one of you. If your business grows, you can easily upgrade by paying the difference; if your clients reduce(hopefully they won’t), you can downgrade at the time of your next renewal.
Please let me know in the comments what you think of the pricing plans and what’s your take on them. Our intention is to make sure InfiniteWP reaches everyone at an affordable price point and deliver more bang for the buck! More details on what we discussed during our weekend getaway coming your way soon! Please keep a tab on our blog.
Please Note: This is an announcement post and the new pricing plans have not yet been implemented. Based on your feedback and other development factors weighed in, the new plans will take atleast a month to go live. Till then, the new plans cannot be purchased. Existing users on the Addon Suite will have the same $199 renewals and will be moved into the Agency plan. Existing Addon Suite Mini users will be on the Starter plan and the renewals will reduce to $49 instead of $99. All Addon Suite, Addon Suite Mini, Enterprise and A-la-Carte Addon users can downgrade or upgrade to any plans once the new pricing kicks in 😀
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