Beta Over – Creately Launches New Plans

Today is the most exciting and exhilarating in our journey with Creately – Creately is out of Beta!

With our move out of beta, we are also announcing two new versions – Creately Public and Creately Plus!

After a year in beta, during which we showcased at Demofall 08 & TechCrunch 50, we now have what we and the majority of our users (over 90% of people give us 4 or more stars) consider to be the best online diagramming and design tool on the Internet. By moving out of Beta we are offering our users and future customers the opportunity to tailor their Creately experience and enable us to continue to improve and keep Creately development moving at the pace it has been.

Creately Public is as the name suggests – Free for anyone to use – it costs you zip, zero, nada, nothing! There are few limits to what you can do with it but it won’t stop the diagram dabbler from creating beautiful looking diagrams.

Creately Plus! is the first of our paid plans – it offers what the heavy user and privacy concerned user will need. (I didn’t say pro here as this is coming in a future version).

A lot has been argued about the merits of Free and Priced models by smart people like Chris Anderson, Malcom Gladwell and Fred Wilson and I am not going to re-iterate the same discussions. We have a fresh (and dare I say adventurous) perspective on the matter.

As a business, we need to make money for our shareholders and to allow us to continue to build Creately and other tools in the future. In order to do this, we need to increase revenues and profits.

Increasing revenue is two-fold.

  • By increasing the number of people using Creately
  • By converting more free users to paying users

And to improve profits, we could;

  • Charge high prices, or;
  • Cut costs

Charging high prices is out as we don’t want to rip off customers. Our operational costs per user are pretty low (but not zero as there is still IT infrastructure to support and at some point everyone needs support – we do provide really good support).

That leaves us with increasing our revenue through user growth.

Basically, if we can increase the number of paying users, we can run a better, bigger business.

When we look at users, we think there are 4 types, those that:

  1. Pay whatever the price, because they can’t live without it.
  2. Pay because they think it’s worth the price.
  3. Pay because they think it is the only option.
  4. Won’t pay or are against paying for software.

We obviously prefer types 1 and 2. Type 3 and 4 alone are unsustainable for a business as a competitor will always come along and disrupt you. However, a mix of these makes a healthy business and user community – we want all types working with Creately.

We believe there is a lot of potential in type 2. However, the price one finds ‘worth it’ is extremely relative to one’s economic situation and usage patterns, be it commercial or private. Given we have really passionate users from all corners of the world and our team is from various parts of the world, we understand these factors deeply.

(In case you didn’t know Creately is developed by Cinergix. Cinergix is based in Melbourne, Australia with team members based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Jakarta, Indonesia and London, UK. A fairly diverse lot over here.)

So what is the right price? It’s relative.

So we are offering Creately at ANY price our users are willing to pay.

(but keep it above one dollar – unfortunately Paypal isn’t free 😉

You may be thinking – They are Mad!!

We might be, however just because one person pays $2 does not mean that is the value to everyone. Perhaps that’s all a student can afford, but to another person using Creately to build mockups for his/her client, it may be worth $20 – the decision has to be personal and realistic.

We think the following factors will help us pull this off:

  • We have built a great piece of software. Using our signout feedback widget we polled over a thousand users after they had used Creately and over 80% said WOW, almost everyone else said it’s Great. People constantly say that the Creately experience is far beyond their current experience from existing similar products.
  • Most people are fair. Creately is a high-value application, for similar products you’d pay hundreds of dollars for a license. So when compared to the alternatives we believe people will choose a sensible price.
  • Our entire team is really passionate about helping customers and it shows in all our user interactions. You guys have told us how much you like our support.

This may be a fairly risky proposition and we know it might not work or be sustainable. So we are piloting this with our group of Beta users – right now this trial is time limited –  so upgrade now while you can name your own price. The offer ends on 17th September 2009.

We’ll keep you posted on how this ‘pricing experiment’ goes. Wish us luck.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

Get started here
Download our all-new eBook for tips on 50 powerful Business Diagrams for Strategic Planning.

Comments

  1. […] been a year since we came out of Beta and launched Creately to the world. I know its not a long time, but for the team here at Creately, its a moment to be proud of as we […]

  2. Michael

    Hi!

    I guess it’s all about the buzz and to find out the price elasticity for the product! So in the future there will be fixed prices and they will be optimizing revenue! But still it’s a company and they need to make money to maintain operations! And still it’s a cool idea!

    By the way: These models work better than one might expect. eBay once said they calculate out of 1000 users one as a fraud. And with the same pricing a well known hotel chain in the US saved some of their hotels in the not so roaring 80’s.

    Michael

    • nick

      Hi Michael,

      Thanks for the support. We have found the pay what you want price to be popular and has beaten our expectations. In the not to distant future though we will be introducing fixed price plans to expand our pricing structure and meet the needs of more users. Stay tuned for future blog posts and newsletters when these announcements are made.

      Thanks
      Nick

  3. Tom

    Hi Guys,

    that’s an interesting business plan. But does it work? Do you get enough sales with it to sustain your business?

    Tom

  4. […] Startup stories from 3 corners of the world addthis_pub = ‘cinergix’; « Beta Over – Creately Launches New Plans […]

  5. […] be found at creately.com and you can read an interesting post about their pricing strategy on their official blog. VN:F [1.6.4_902]Rate this tool:saving…Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast) Share and […]

  6. Catherine

    Glad to hear that you will allow people to increase their chosen subscriptions when their circumstances/needs change!

  7. admin

    Thanks for the heads-up Paul.

    @Roland – yes we’ve had some issues with Paypal. And it can be very frustrating for our users. Rest assured that this is something we’re looking into at the highest priority. Do you have any alternative you can suggest.

    @Pol We would not only allow but we’d hope for that too 😉
    Actually we hope to learn more about our users with this experiment with the aim of building a better system for the exchange of value.

    Charan
    Creately.com

  8. Guys,

    actually I would perform the 2$ student version and scale up, when I am finished with my studies. However, I don’t like paypal. And with your success you automatically raise their success. For nothing?!

    Are there no alternatives?

    Best,

    Roland

  9. Pol C.

    It sounds like an amazing idea, but something came to me, are you going to allow people like that “student” who pays $2 increase his payments to $20 when he uses it commercially?

  10. Paul

    Your link to upgrade has a typo it’s pointing at create.com

Leave a comment

*
*

13 + fifteen =

Back to top