Pricing for post-beta launch

to be silly
so groups can work together on a project
to collect cool band names
to auto follow my blog readers

to be honest thought i doubt i will pay for tweetbot. though it is a cool service, just not something i use for profit. would definitely keep it in mind if that changes though. could see possible benefits for future clients or to suggest to friends

I am pretty sure autofollow will always be a free feature... We feel twitter should allow it already.

That being said, groups working on a project seems like a business thing. We have already seen the cool band names project and want to make it easier for you to do that, so we have something in mind for that as well.

My friends and I use tweetbots to amuse ourselves anonymously and in comedic ways. I'm not sure if I'd pay for it or not...

My friends and I use tweetbots to amuse ourselves anonymously and in comedic ways. I'm not sure if I'd pay for it or not...

iamvinne: Do you have a lot of bots? A few bots?

I have 3 bots registered but only 2 in active use. I'm not sure if they'd fall under "free" usage on your post-beta model or not. 8 or so people using the bots but no commercial usage.

I see good things in the tweetbots service but I don't think my goofy use is something I'd pay for either, you know?

have you guys considered a free option that (I'm sure it will be controversial) that posts an ad of some sort after every 10 tweets or whatever?

If people don't like it they can pay.

Just another option.

you could also do something like limit the posts per day via free bot (30 or so?) and have the pay ones uncapped.

Just ideas while drinking and tweeting and coding

I agree with some of the sentiment above... perhaps a free group of bots and a paid group of bots.

Optionally, you could throttle how often the free bots work (e.g, query once a day for free vs. once every 15 min for paid)

Alternatively, you could add additional features to the bots for paid customers (e.g., basic auto follow for free vs. stats/notification/custom options for paid customers)

[both of those provide logical upgrade paths -- and present an opportunity to offer the upgrade when its most meaningful and needed]

Finally, you could sell a few of the characters in the post (some SMS providers do this). Not sure how successful that is for provider/advertiser or "wanted" by message sender or recipient.

We have considering a free bot with advertising on it. We will likely limit the number of free bots you can create and the advertisements will just run a couple times a day. They will have slow check times and auto follow times, but I doubt we will limit the actions they can do, just speed and how many bots you can make with a free account.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, this is exactly what we have been discussing internally.

We are trying out using the bot to allow a bunch of Yahoo folks to live blog via a single twitter account when they are out at events.

We also use another twitter account to announce new stuff on our developer site. Same deal applies allowing folks to post stuff without having to know the login for the ydn twitter helps a lot.

If the product got a bit more mature and proved reliable, I would pay around £25 per month for the service. More (about double) if it was robust enough and configurable enough to run clients' services on (note: not for spam, but for corporate Twitter accounts and announcement-bots).