100% agreement. Our small team has spent the better part of 2 months getting ready to rollout subscription pricing for two separate apps with Chargify's model in mind. We cannot roll them out faster and loved the option to grow slowly. Once we had 50 customers we knew there would be no hardship in paying for Chargify. It was great that these guys "got it" and really understood what bootstrappers go thru. Now it does feel like we got "punched in the gut" as another user said.
Yes, exactly. I thought the same thing. "Finally, there's someone out there who understands the needs of a bootstrapping, young business". But apparently it was a scam. If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
There's no way Chargify would have the customer base they have now having launched with these pricing plans from day one. With the several other options out there, someone starting out with nothing would NOT choose to pay $100/month right off the bat, without even considering hosting costs and merchant/gateway costs, knowing there are other options out there for $19/month. I'm happy for them that their "too good to be true" pricing sucked in some customers, but it sure does suck for us.
The attitude that "there will always be cheaper options out there, but we won't be one of them" is a far cry from how it was early on. It used to be "we understand, and offer the best pricing around". It was so relaxing to know that $50/month would get you up to 500 customers, with 49 of them being at no charge (even 10-15 at no charge would be great). Coming from that, no, $39/month for as little as 1 customer does not feel like a good deal, unfortunately. Downgraded from $100, maybe, upgraded from $0, no.
I'm truly shocked the old prices aren't going to be grandfathered in.
I think I'm going to bite the bullet and (re-)integrate with someone else. Ugh.
