When a technology product comes together and is finally ready to be released into the wild, it can often be delayed by the difficulty of settling on a reasonable pricing model. There are so many questions and variables to consider:

*Should we offer our product for free?

If we do, how will we pay for it?

How many plans should we offer?

How much would people be willing to pay for that feature?

Which features should fall under each of these plans?

Can we support organizational billing yet?

Do those pricing tricks like $9.99 really work?

How can I keep this simple?*

Though we certainly worked through these questions and many more when choosing our own structure, we admit it: we fell short. Our first pricing model really sucked, and we finally sat down and worked through straightening it out.

From a quantitative perspective, we knew we needed to change our pricing structure because our conversions from free to paid plans were much lower than we had hoped. Since inception, our pricing model focused on the number of topics we would provide. The free plan allowed users to create one topic and subsequent tiers allowed for additional topics. The logic behind this structure was and is understandable: more professional users who are more likely to pay for a product, especially those who manage numerous social media accounts, want to create multiple topics for each of their clients or interests.

However, we realized that this functionality was not enough of an incentive for most users to upgrade, even if they truly could have benefitted from the separation of topics. As a result, we saw users continually tweaking their free topic to search for new interests, skewing their results and negatively affecting their UpContent user experience. Knowing that we wanted to improve both of these aspects, we felt we needed to shift away from just number of topics to differentiated plans based on features and user personas.

Over the last several months, we have had numerous conversations with our users and with each other to discuss how we could create a pricing structure that would offer all of our users an enjoyable and useful experience but also provide an opportunity for us to provide even more functionality to those who are willing to invest in their content discovery and curation. Limitations are necessary when creating tiered pricing plans, but we also did not want to sacrifice the quality of the technology we would present our free users.

Another key problem we needed to solve was the confusion over multiple tiers. Let’s face it: even we couldn’t keep our numbers straight. We sometimes fumbled over pricing and topic numbers when talking with potential customers, which was embarrassing and, frankly, unacceptable.

To aid in solving these pricing problems, we had numerous conversations and discussions with our users, but we also wanted to test our hypotheses on what current and future offerings would drive customer delight, and consequently, conversions to our professional tiers. To do this, we created a conjoint analysis survey to be completed by a fully qualified and random sample of digital content curators.

After analyzing the data we received from our survey and after a lot of careful consideration, we think we’ve landed on a new pricing model that works for everyone.

We’re thrilled to announce we’re offering just TWO plans with straightforward, simplified pricing.

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Our Personal Plan is free and allows users to create one topic, read full-text articles and blog posts within the platform, share unlimited content via social media, and sort by all of our filters. This plan is great for the casual user who may only manage his or her own social media accounts, is more interested in research and ideation than building out a comprehensive curation strategy, and/or enjoys sharing interesting content about a particular niche.

We also amped things up with our Professional Plan, allowing these users access to more premium features in addition to our free plan such as the ability to create unlimited topics, the automatic removal of UpContent branding on social shares, premium customer support, and privacy control. This plan is ideal for community managers and business professionals who may manage multiple clients’ social media accounts, want to be more intentional with their curation strategy, and/or want to post relevant content from a variety of interests.

Not sure which plan is right for you? No problem. We want all of our users to experience these Professional features for free with no strings attached for 14 days so they can make an informed decision about which plan works best for them. After the trial period, the Professional Plan is only $10/month. You can even get two months free if you opt in for an annual plan for only $100/year.

We’re pretty pleased with this change and hope you are, too! Down the road, we may introduce more options for larger businesses, but we think this pricing structure will best serve our current customers right now. Current paid users--don’t worry. We’ve got you covered, too. Expect to hear from us about how this change benefits you, too.

Ready to get started? Give those Professional features a test drive if you haven’t already and sign up for free.

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