I’ve been using the beta version of KISSmetrics on Shutter Scouts to track conversion rates. Frankly, this was more of an experiment as the site hasn’t really been promoted and opened up yet but I wanted the get the analytics infrastructure in place first. KISSmetrics allows you to track events in a user-specified conversion funnel with simple charts showing (for example):
KISSmetrics got a lot of publicity around the startup and web development blogs/news sites so it was understandable to have assumed that startups were their target market. This month, KISSmetrics came out of beta and announced their pricing:
- $149 / month: 1m events tracked
- $399 / month: 5m events tracked
- $699 / month: 10m events tracked
- No free plan
W…T…F?! Frankly, I was gobsmacked and shocked when I received the pricing announcement. What the hell was all this? Were these annual prices? Nope. Who was this service being aimed at? Certainly not any sort of bootstrapped startup business. I don’t mind the lack of a free plan (in fact, I think it’s a good move) but where’s the $10-20/month startup plan for < 10,000 events? And then I got angry. I’d liked KISSmetrics. As the name implied I thought it was simple. I wrote a Rails plugin for the service to help rails developers easily send events to KISSmetrics. I spoke about the service at my local Ruby developers group. I recommended the service. Now I have to go and retract that recommendation. Even on the “small” plan, KISSmetrics would need to give you insights that save your business at least $200 every single month and all within 1m events. I wonder how many other people will retract their recommendations for KISSmetrics?
If I put my cynical hat on, I wonder if KISSmetrics’ business plan is actually about extracting large wads of cash from the bank accounts of venture-backed startups… because that pricing is far too rich for anyone else. Though I can’t help feel that for every $149/month plan they sell now, they could have sold more than 15 $10/month plans. It also means I’ll be staying well away from their KISSinsights product (and anything else that team may produce) and we should all be more wary about using pricing-unannounced-beta-products in the future.
This is a trend i keep seeing on a lot of web applications lately. It will just leave more room for company like getclicky.com to undercut them in the future.
Look at mixpanel, there pricing is better but still rich.
I’m glad someone else feels the same way as I do. It seems like everything kiss preaches is about lean bootstrapped startups — exactly the market they priced themselves out of. I’m bootstrapping an app that I wanted to use KISSMetrics on, but at $150 a month, the analytics would be more than I spend on Heroku. It really is a shame.
I use the free version of KISSinsights. I like the idea and usefulness of it. As much as I’d like to upgrade, the price ($29 per month) is unjustifiable for a bootstrapped and zero-income startup. I hope they offer a $5 to $10 plan. My last resort is to just implement my own KISSinsights-clone (just for my own use).
As someone who has followed kissmetrics for a while, I was a bit put off at first by the price, but then it made sense to me. (plus if you’re a beta user, the first 6 months are half off).
Think about it, $150/month is cheap if you’re able to fine tune your conversion rates and make more out of your sales/subscriptions. If you’re selling say a $20/month plan, and you’re tracking 1 million events (NOT pageviews, assume 600kPV on 1M events), if you can increase your conversions from 2%-4% you’d easily pay for this subscription and more. Then once you get to a point you are content with, cancel your subscription.
It might even give you more motivation to optimize your funnel.
My guest is that we are not their target audience and they are better of with 1 paid customer at 149$ than 1..5 at $20. However, I feel the same way as you do.
Why didn’t you just email Hiten and ask him?
Also, Brian’s comment is spot on. If you’re in the business of making money, than a service like KM should help you make more money, and pay for itself. If it doesn’t, you stop using it.
I think you might be a bit spoiled by all of the “free” on the internet. Zero-profit plans are offered by companies as a marketing hack– and companies can generally do the cost-benefit analysis to see if it makes sense. I’d wager KISSmetrics is kicking enough butt that marketing isn’t their main problem– carefully scaling probably is.
99% of web companies have (and meet) a payroll. If they have 5 team members (avg. salary of $65k, add 30% for overhead/burden/admin/etc), you have around $50k a month in payroll. The idea of an extra $149 on top of that $50,000 is nothing for a company like that (if it moves the needle).
Sorry, but I totally disagree. The only one who built up the expectation and entitlement for an “affordable by a person/company who is making no meaningful revenue” plan is you. There’s nothing “bizarre” about targeting later stage businesses than yours.
Just because you’re a bootstrapped start-up, it doesn’t mean that you have to sell to other bootstrapped start-ups.
A start-up developing products for other start-ups isn’t going to last very long…
if you have 1M events per month to track then you have $149/month to pay for this service (if it’s value-added ? I personally haven’t tried it)
w/1M events per month, I’m sure 1 Adsense Ad with a .00001 CTR would pay for it.
Perhaps their thinking is that if you really need KISSmetrics that you can afford to pay the higher fees?
And conversely, if you can’t afford it, then you probably shouldn’t be optimizing?
This reminds me of the ZenDesk fiasco. Of course, they -can- charge whatever they want and there’s no need to have a free plan. But those plan prices are way out of line of all the other metrics apps I’ve seen. They are probably more in line with what an enterprise level site might pay and nowhere near what a bootstrapped startup can afford. You have to be making a great deal of money for a 0.3% tune up on conversions to make that much money every month (you do the math). Furthermore, you have to be convinced that this program will give you the .3% whereas another program, free or more affordable could not. So glad I didn’t signup for the beta.
I agree with the author that Kissmetrics’ pricing is a bit irregular.
If 1m events costs $149 and 5m costs $399, then there could be a middle ground for those whose requirements are simply 2m events? How about 500k events? It’s is possible and I suspect the marginal cost of supporting more plans is $0.
One consideration is that presenting fewer plans allow for a less cluttered screen but there is still an elegant solution as shown here – http://www.trafficspaces.com/plans/.
That said, I think Kissmetrics are well within their rights to exclude free services for now. After all, they have bills to pay and loads of free users potentially gaming their system do not make business sense.
I’d just like to clarify one point which a few people are missing: I’m *not* looking for a free plan (in fact, I mention that the lack of a free plan is a good idea); I am looking for an affordable plan to get me started.
Also, for reference, here the Hacker News link & comments: http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2010/07/kissmetrics-bizarre-pricing/
I don’t get this. As an analytics company, they know how much usage their clients are getting… They could charge for usage. A competitor that does will take a big bite into the market. Isn’t this why Amazon Web Services have taken off?