Just a quick announcement regarding PearBudget pricing. These types of notes are never fun to write. I’ll start off with the good news, then.
If you currently have an account with PearBudget, your subscription price will not be changing! You signed on at a certain price point ($3/month or $30/year), and we are going to honor that price point forever. Yay! Think of it as an early-adopter discount.
Next, for the sort-of-good news.
If you sign up for a new subscription before January 20th, 2011, you’ll still get the current pricing, forever. Yay! That’s a month from now, so if you haven’t yet, hopefully, you’ll be creating an account and checking PearBudget out. All you need to do is to sign up for a subscription before 2011/01/20, and you’ll lock in at the current price. (Note: an account is different from a subscription. An account is simply your data at PearBudget — your budget. A subscription is when you’re signed up to use PearBudget beyond the 30-day trial. So you’d need to sign up (that’s the account part), and also enter your credit card info (that’s the subscription part) any time before January 20th.)
Finally, the kind-of-good, kind-of-bad news.
PearBudget’s been growing (which is great), but we don’t want to lose the sense of personal care and attention that we’ve been able to give you guys over the last three years. We don’t want e-mails to slip through the cracks. We don’t want the servers to get overloaded. In order to keep our level of service high, and to make sure that the PearBudget backend is capable of handling you well, we’re going to be getting some help. It’s not going to change PearBudget’s simplicity, or our personal touch, but it is going to take some capital. So, for new subscribers (beginning Jan. 20th), we’re going to be raising the rates of the service, to $4.95/month, or $49.50/year. We’re sorry to do this; we hope that new subscribers will still feel as though PearBudget is saving them significant money compared with what they’d have spent if they were “in the dark”. The reports we get from our users suggest that they’re saving well over an order of magnitude greater than that each month (that is, each month, PearBudget helps them save more than $50 that they would have otherwise spent on things that don’t get them closer to their goals).
We looked at a couple of other ways to raise the funds for this, but we’re committed to not showing ads to our users, we will never ever ever sell user data, and we aren’t interested in taking on debt to finance our growth. Hopefully that resonates with you? The best course of action, then, is to raise the subscription rates for our new users.
To reiterate — if you’re reading this, you probably already have an account, and your price won’t be changing. If you’re a new user, you still have a month before the deadline to sign up and to lock in your price at the current rate. We hope you’ll take advantage of that.
In the next couple of days, we’ll be updating the copy on the site to reflect the new pricing info, but we wanted to make sure to get the word out here and on Twitter ASAP.
If you have any questions, as always, I hope you’ll e-mail me at charlie@pearbudget.com. Thanks, as always, for being awesome, and for your time with PearBudget.