Announcing: Premium Services now available to Get Satisfaction Companies

Matt: Thanks very much for the polite and articulate response. It's very helpful to get your point of view.

The cool but challenging thing about Get Satisfaction is that we've got companies of all sizes using our system. Many, many startups and one-or-two person operations, as well as a number of medium-sized retailers, offline retailers, big name brands, Fortune 500 companies... the list goes on. And when your potential customer base is as wide as that, figuring out appropriate price points for a for-pay product is challenging, to say the least. Adding to that is the relative difficulty of moving from a totally free to a free-plus-paid model here in the startup world.

One thing I can promise is that we are entirely committed to supporting companies of all sizes within Get Satisfaction. We believe one of the huge values of our service is that one customer can talk to many different companies on our site, all in the same format and with the same spirit of openness and communication, regardless of relative company size. That's something we know we need to preserve to be successful.

This is the beginning, not the end, of our premium services, and in the coming weeks and months we're going to look into rolling out additional price points and packages that serve other elements of our community than the ones at which Basic and Pro are targeted. One thing's for sure -- getting feedback from the entire community, whether here, on Twitter, on blogs, or anywhere else it shows up, is incredibly valuable in helping us figure out where our service needs to go, and we really appreciate it.

In the meantime, for everybody who's chomping at the bit to try out the new stuff but definitely can't afford it: we do have a scholarship program that anyone can apply to. Though it was initially intended for open source projects, non- and not-for-profits, and some educational institutions, we'll definitely consider anybody feeling the economic pinch. Just email at scholarship-at-getsatisfaction.com and tell us why you need a lower price point, and we'll go from there.

Ok, all, thanks again for all the input, and here's the plan we've put together.

Recognizing that there are a number of smaller organizations in our system, 1-2 person development shops and other people just getting their businesses off the ground who still want community and all the other good things Get Satisfaction provides, and that these smaller companies make up a big part of the value that Get Satisfaction creates for every user who touches our service, we're creating a new package and price point targeted directly at them.

The "Starter" package has the same feature set as the initial set of Basic services, but is limited to one employee who has access to the full suite of Premium tools (note: any number of additional employees can participate, they just won't have access to the premium tools). This plan is also limited to 1000 unique users per month. And yes, I know we're not giving you access to the number of uniques you get per month yet, but if you're one of these companies, you're definitely under that line. (And soon, we'll be giving users of these plans access to unique user stats and other stats, too!) All for only $49/month.

The $99 for 3 months promotion still applies for these kinds of accounts. We're working on adding the new package into the system, and it will definitely be in there by the time the promotion ends, but if you can't wait to get started, sign up for the $99 price point now and email me at lane -at- getsatisfaction.com to let me know you would prefer to flip to the Starter monthly rate once the promotion period ends.

I hope this addresses the concerns stated above adequately. We're working hard here to maintain the correct balance between providing value to companies, making our service affordable to everybody, and ensuring that as a company we have a sustainable business model. It's a bit of a tricky tightrope to walk, but it's important to us. We're grateful to every company that uses Get Satisfaction, whether they pay us or not (well, except for the ones who try to spam us!), and we want to make sure you stick around for the long-term. Your business, as they say, is important to us. :)

Comments welcome! (How could they not be?)

Edited at 1:46 for clarity

Hi, Anthony. I want to stress again that these are new services built on top of the existing free service, and not us charging for things that had previously been free. The service as you were using it before this week continues to exist and will continue to exist as a free service, including the RSS feed of recently active feeds topics that you refer to. In fact, we've even *added* new functionality -- the "lite" version of the management view for companies -- to the free service with this release, and we intend to continue to building out new features for free users as well as those who pay us.

But, we are a business, and we need to make money to keep going. As a fellow startup, I'm sure you can understand that. And so, we will continue to release some features for free and some features for paid, and while will make those decisions in as reasonable a fashion as possible, some companies will be priced out of certain features as a result. That's just the way it is -- we have to draw the line somewhere -- but we are committed to making even the free version of our application a useful, viable, embeddable, accessible, effective service for the companies that use it, as it has proven to be for so many companies for the entire first year before we released our paid services.

Great question, Carlos. Nope. No ads in Help Center.

Hi Carlos, The Help Center interface is free as an open source project. The Basic API, which Help Center sits on top of, is provided at no charge up to 1000 API queries per day.

Anthony, I believe this answers your question as well? Your current use of the API shouldn't run into any charges. However, if you find that page is getting a lot of hits and you're doing a query every time somebody visits the page, you might just want to cache it on your side and reload every 5 minutes. Does that answer your question?