Launching Pro accounts

Launching Pro accounts

michal frackowiak 1229516457|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Without much exaggeration — today is a very important day for Wikidot, our Team and you, our great Users. So far using Wikidot has been free, now we are making the next step in the development of our service. On behalf of our whole Team I am happy to announce the launch of paid services at Wikidot.com that greatly extend our existing free offering.

Obviously many people appreciate Wikidot as a free service. For the last two years being free was our key to success. But offering solely free services has serious disadvantages and very often we are not able to fulfill the growing expectations of our Users within the free model. Our goal is to combine the best of both worlds by continuing offering the free services and adding useful and requested features that can make using Wikidot more efficient as extra paid features.

For the last couple of months, backed by our helpful community, we have been designing and building the subscription plans and accompanying features. Today we are happy to officially launch the premium services.

The Pro plans, valid for your whole Wikidot account and all your Sites, allow you to:

• create more Sites,
• use more storage space (10 GB and up) and larger files (50 MB per file, more to come),
• use custom domain for your Sites,
• generate advanced web statistics for all your Sites,
• access your Sites through secure SSL,
• add favicons for your Sites,
• create your forum signature,
• add more privacy control (protect your profile),
• access pro.wikidot.com — internal issue tracker and forums for better contact with our Team,
• get faster responses with priority email support

and much more, with prices starting at $5 / month.

Read the plan comparison and Upgrades FAQ for more details.

I deeply believe the introduction of paid model will not only improve the experience of Pro User, but will also let us invest even more money and work in Wikidot.com. Therefore owners of free accounts should also benefit from this change in our strategy.

Best regards,

Michal Frackowiak and The Wikidot Team

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Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me

last edited on 1229539884|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by michal frackowiak + show more

Re: Launching Pro accounts: good luck and success!

Helmuti_pdorf 1229588490|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Thanks Michal - to go such a long way - and I wish You and Your team good luck and a big success for this project!

Best regards
Helmut

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Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org, www.zusi.de (Demo-Video)

Wollen Sie Wikidot helfen im deutschen » Handbuch ?

Re: Launching Pro accounts

michal frackowiak 1229590183|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Thank you, Helmuti.

We will do our best!

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Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me

Re: Launching Pro accounts

Flemming 1229600712|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

hi Michal Frackowiak et al

I think it is a very good idea to launch paid services at wikidot.com.
I find €59.95 to high a price though.
€30 per year would be more like it.
I wouldn't mind paying €20 per year for the features I all ready got.

best regards Flemming

Re: Launching Pro accounts

Craig Macomber 1229631429|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I would recommended a lower level paid plan. The prices are low for what you get, but a bit high for the trivial things some people want that they can't quite get for free. I would be delighted to have 1/4 of a pro plan for half the price of one.

Something the same as free but with 2 gb of space, 30 mb files, fav icons and custom domains and maybe 10 members for private sites, for around 24$ a year would probably bring in additional money. Its super cheap so it leads people into the paid services where they will be likely to upgrade.

Personally I would be very likely to buy that, then shift to a more expensive plan when I need it, where currently I'm just going to work with my current free sites.

For many people, 60$ looks like a real purchase, while 25$ is something they can afford to spend just to try something.

Re: Launching Pro accounts

David Marseilles 1229662827|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Better grouping (with some social networking in mind), custom forms, and a little more forum juice (optional to avoid alienating those that like the current elegant style) would help me help wikidot grow.

I was very close to enticing one of the largest Wii clan communities into setting up here a couple of months ago. I'm hopeful that in about a year, I'll have another chance to bring them in, so keep up the great progress.

Re: Launching Pro accounts

michal frackowiak 1229677591|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

@Craig Macomber

Nice idea. Certainly $25 < $60 and this could bring more people on-board indeed. But how to call them? Pro-? Pro Lite? ;-)
We will think about it for sure.

2 other things we will probably try would be to:

• launch 30-days free trial Pro
• monthly payments — Pro account would cost about $7 / month and could be a nice alternative to pre-paying $60 / year.
• optionally: affiliate and discount program (just an idea)

On the other hand, Lukasz is doing a comparison of Wikidot vs. our competitors: http://squark.pl/dev:wiki-farms-comparison . It is not completed yet, but it clearly shows that still our pricing is far more competitive than PBWiki, Wetpaint, Wikispaces, Ning and most of other offers.

Anyway, we will do our best to adopt to the market. There is no point in selling plans people will not buy, so we are open to suggestions!

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Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me

last edited on 1229682729|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by michal frackowiak + show more

Re: Launching Pro accounts

Brigantia Chris 1229862001|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hi Michal,

A very good plan Sir and I for one think that your pricing is spot on. I like the openness with which you are approaching this move; it stands you in good stead.

An idea for a paid service might be dynamic content. By this I mean bolt-in feeds such as specific news articles, discussions containing certain searchable phrases, etc. I would recommend making good use of the resource that you have in the various open wikis you host insomuch as enabling people to make sections of their wikis available for dynamic importing onto other wikis. You could even pay a small premium back to people for making such content available, (all virtual of course so in truth if someone builds up a credit they must spend it with you guys). This could greatly improve traffic especially on niche wikis which of course in turn would mean more available dynamic content.

I’m sure that this could be developed further – thoughts anyone?

Chris