Guys do the math on a 50 person company we just went from the $300 per year range to over $6,000 just insane. I don't understand the excitement in the comments of the price being skyrocketed.
There is so much to learn from this video! The format is great and the conversation is pretty genuine, it almost feels like you were invited to a three people zoom call with Jason & David. Great work guys, please keep posting more videos like this one
Only 15 min in and wanted to say thank you for the transparency! so refreshing to see and learn from real business decision-making in the tech space. Would love to see more in the future!
The new pricing is still >$130 per user per year. Not exactly cheap outside of the western world, but still an improvement for pet projects for small teams. For commercial projects I guess even the 99 should not have been an issue.
I love Basecamp. We use it in our company with 150 employees. Appreciate that the new pricing is only for new customers. I used to recommend Basecamp to every small firm (upto 100 employees) that I met earlier. And yes, price was an important factor. I used to jokingly tell them I shall offer a money back guarantee if you don’t like basecamp ;-) I am sad that such small companies (50 - 100 employees) may not be able to afford Basecamp going forward. :-( … I won’t be offering any money back guarantees either. Best wishes to you. This could be a great decision for basecamp’s wealth. Interesting that you announced this “wealth creation experiment” on Diwali. Happy Diwali to you.
Same here Aseem. That’s a similar segment that will loose my word of mouth recommendation. (In this case small non-profits with maybe 5-10 staff and a few handfuls volunteers, maybe as many as 150 rarely active volunteers)
That you Jason and David have been running this company together for so long "staying" together without killing each other business wise (so to speak) is an example of how good you are at leading the way by what you preach and that basecamp has teamwork in its DNA, not only in its code but also in its creators.
Great move! I love the thought on how important it is to look at the business with fresh eyes - what have we become so used to we don't realize is something we need to look at?
I'm really glad you made this change. The 2-3 person teams, especially when just forming a new company, will be without any income, before their product or service is launched and has a chance to make it in the marketplace. I'm doing that just now. I don't want to overspend on tools during that period. Also I think you'll need to give it more time than just until the end of the year, to really see the uptick in subscriptions. It's going to take some time before the target audience that chose other tools during the $99 period will notice the change or give Basecamp another look. You should even consider advertising it more heavily. Last thing, it's awesome you allow customers to stay on the plan they originally signed up for, under the same terms, when you make these changes. It builds trust.
This is a really great video, thanks for sharing guys. The intro says it all, it's great to provide extra detail from specific discussions/decisions, to compliment the more meta conversations from other sources. Congratulations!
Loved listening to this! Been a HEY user since the beginning and always wanted to use Basecamp for my freelancing business but couldn't afford the $99. Been using Basecamp with recent clients and it's been exactly what I was looking for. Love this new pricing model and hope it stays!
I've heard about Basecamp for nearly over 15 years but always turned away because the pricing didn't make sense for me (working mostly as a Solo-Preneur with a few Outsourced Contractors from time to time). However, when I saw the new pricing structure, I immediately signed up to give it a try... Now, it looks like I'll be a customer for quite some time ; )
Thank you guys for this 🙏🏻 good and informative conversation. The 99 plan was a bit heavy for my workflow and free version too limiting although I have I always LOVED using Basecamp ever since version 2. Signed up instantly when I found about this new plan!
I stopped using Basecamp when it wen to $99 a month. As a solo freelancer I just could not justify it. I have started frrelancing more and need a good management platform and when I saw the new pricing I decided to join.
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Thanks for the discussion. It was interesting to see you two, although David was probably not looking at Jason during the talk, as he pointed out in one of the recent rework episodes. ;-) I would prefer to have these discussions in the podcast, (It doesn't have to be rework, it could be a new one) since you didn't have any visuals to show. I mean if you show some functionality in Basecamp or Hey it totally makes sense to have a video but if you don't, listening to your voices is enough for me.
As an individual freelance developer I couldn't bring myself to pay $99 just for myself it was too much. I had a free account but found it was too limited. I'm super excited about this change. I closed my free account and signed up for a "new" account to get this pricing. Because while $99 was too much $11 is very reasonable.
Just to chip in: Jason's got a point about getting the word out. I found out about this price drop completely by accident when browsing Jason's tweets. I'm an old customer: we used to use Basecamp at my previous job, and I wanted check in what you guys are up to. Now, there's a lot of small social media creators who I think would benefit from using Basecamp in running their small media businesses (think video production, brand deals, merch, etc.) but who haven't even heard about Basecamp.
That was great. I’d be interested in hearing how you think about adding new features without increasing the complexity of the whole product too much (both as a user and in the design + code)
Big fan of these talks! Going even deeper on metrics related to these bigger strategic moves would be nice, but I guess there's a limit to what you can (and want to) share. Curious what software you used to host the meeting and record?
Thanks! We recorded audio/video on Zencastr. They offer a split screen right out of the box. Record, get the MOV file, upload right to UA-cam. No editing. -JF
Fascinating insights. Thanks. Sometimes too much brain power hides the obvious. $99 is too hefty a leap for small outfits and freelancers, and way too cheap for big organisations. We're a small team with big clients/ Now signed up on the new per user plan and will be introducing big clients as part of our projects. If they like it who knows how the network continues to grow. Good Luck :-)
I met basecamp in the first advertising agency that I worked as a web developer. I hated it, but not for basecamp per se. What happened is that we did not have a logical methodology on how to use it correctly. Today I have been super dependent on basecamp for 2 years. It is my brain and my way of communicating certain topics with certain clients. In the way I use it, which is more than anything with my clients, it is much cheaper, new cost version, because I can practically have a single user and many clients at a minimum price. Though I hope the old plan will at least hold for us old folks. Well, I'm used to paying. Since in this way you do not think about the account going up or down. A single price maintains peace of mind. A cost-per-customer type hybrid plan capped at $99.00 but that's just an opinion. I understand that they must have costs involved in these decisions.
This pricing benefits a lot of newbie freelancers or very small and low income agencies (1-5 people), which I also think are the ones who will benefit greatly with Basecamp. I'm currently experimenting on adding it on my project management system :)
Great discussion. Very interesting. Would be great to hear more about product development ... why you decided on the various new Basecamp 4 features? ... why you decided to launch Hey?
I got fucked on this pricing change. I was an existing customer paying $1,000/yr and these two multimillionaires refused just change my pricing to 'per user' (just two of us/small business). Had to cancel everything and start over with a new account to get the new pricing. It's hard to take these two seriously after that.
Now that it's actually affordable for small biz or solopreneurs, I hope that after the pricing experiment, that it stays this way. Hate to invest with a lot of projects and tasks only to have to start looking again for another tool come January
Darrin, if you sign up on this plan, we'll honor it even if we decide to end the experiment for new customers down the road. Anyone who signs up now gets this offering even if we stop offering it. -JF
I hope we get notice if you are going to increase existing customers, so we can cancel our two accounts. I have a saying, don't fix what is not broken. So disappointed.
Hey Jim... No plans to do anything with existing customers at this point. Just an experiment for new customers. If, and that's a big if, we decide to stick with this pricing (or some variation on it), we'll offer very fair transition options for customers. In 18 years, we've only changed prices a few times, and we've always made it a very fair transition. -JF
Why do you corporate thought leaders and decision makers have to needlessly use the F-word and other profanity in your dialogue? David sounds like a crass unpolished little junior high school boy with a filthy mouth. It really is unprofessional and off-putting -- and most especially, unnecessary!
Because people talk like that, and these are two guys talking. Fuck is a word like any other word, the profanity is in your mind and the way you described David, says more about you than anyone else
@@MrMouxy What happened to civility and manners and speaking in an appropriate way -- especially in a corporate setting? The profanity is not in my mind, it is based in the mores of our culture and society. Try looking up the word in a dictionary or online and you will find that it is described as obscene or vulgar.
@@user-ti9zc1xv2b Who cares? For one, I care. And I would imagine many more others, too. Take your profanity out to the street and the back alleys. It does not belong in the corporate world, as it only minimizes the credibility of the user and the professionalism of the company for which he or she works..
I haven't watched the site for a while to know exactly what the various pricing options were and unless you listen closely you think Basecamp has always been $99/mo. This, as was discussed late in the video, isn't the case. There was a time when more entry-level plan(s) was/were available. So this isn't so much a "we woke up and decided to try something new" as it's a change to the price list - accompanied by a 45 minute video instead of a boring email about how inflation is the devil that made us do it. Three ways to make more money according to Jay Abraham: a. More customers. (which I think is the intent here) b. Repeat business with those customers. c. Sell higher ticket products to those customers to increase revenue. (which is likely a 3 to 5 year object - get more customers then start raising each user x %) For me - I find most of my customers (computer/financial software consultant here) are reluctant to participate as users in a project management system. I think their attitude has largely been "hey, we hired you to do the work so you keep your own project management notes". For me as a small business, this new pricing would be cheaper. My plan B would be to start tracking most of the info I track in Basecamp in Google Workspace ( I already have Todoist for tasks and Google Drive for files ). My overriding concern is this becomes about lock-in. Which is a trend with many applications. - Increase the number of subscribers - Start increasing the pricing once they're in The trend online across many companies in this space is they get a customer to put so much data into the system and rely on it so much that once price increases start happening regularly the customer needs to do a cost vs benefit ROI analysis of moving all their data out of an existing system ( like Basecamp ) vs finding something else which might be cheaper. I hear the objection already - "yeah but $x per month per user would be cheaper than $99 per month now" and that's presently true. But it might not be true if the Per User / Per Month price rapidly rise or changes or rises x% every few years.
Hey Wayne. Yes - we've seen companies do that over and over. No one likes that. That's not been our path, and we have 18 years of experience to show for that. We don't lock customers in (no long-term contracts, you can export your data at any time, etc), we don't frequently changes prices on customers (it's been ~7 years since we've explored prices at all), etc. In fact, we still have customers on Basecamp Classic - the original version from 2004 - paying us the same prices from way back when because we never required anyone to upgrade or move to a new version. We go above and beyond to be fair and thoughtful, and I think our record shows that we are. -JF
![Everything You [PROBABLY] Don't Know About Negotiation | Chris Voss](/img/n.gif)
Guys do the math on a 50 person company we just went from the $300 per year range to over $6,000 just insane. I don't understand the excitement in the comments of the price being skyrocketed.
There is so much to learn from this video! The format is great and the conversation is pretty genuine, it almost feels like you were invited to a three people zoom call with Jason & David. Great work guys, please keep posting more videos like this one
Thanks America. Aiming to do another one next week. Hopefully we'll keep getting better at this. -JF
Only 15 min in and wanted to say thank you for the transparency! so refreshing to see and learn from real business decision-making in the tech space. Would love to see more in the future!
Thanks Elia, glad you enjoyed it. -JF
Fantastic insight. The $99 was too much for just me... and Basecamp free was too limited
The new pricing is still >$130 per user per year. Not exactly cheap outside of the western world, but still an improvement for pet projects for small teams. For commercial projects I guess even the 99 should not have been an issue.
now its $299 i don't even know how its hiked so much. was just about to revisit but its impossible for me
I love Basecamp. We use it in our company with 150 employees.
Appreciate that the new pricing is only for new customers.
I used to recommend Basecamp to every small firm (upto 100 employees) that I met earlier. And yes, price was an important factor. I used to jokingly tell them I shall offer a money back guarantee if you don’t like basecamp ;-)
I am sad that such small companies (50 - 100 employees) may not be able to afford Basecamp going forward. :-(
… I won’t be offering any money back guarantees either.
Best wishes to you.
This could be a great decision for basecamp’s wealth. Interesting that you announced this “wealth creation experiment” on Diwali. Happy Diwali to you.
Same here Aseem. That’s a similar segment that will loose my word of mouth recommendation. (In this case small non-profits with maybe 5-10 staff and a few handfuls volunteers, maybe as many as 150 rarely active volunteers)
IVE BEEN BEGGING FOR THIS PRICE ADJUSTMENT. As soon as they made it, I start migrating my business back to Basecamp
That you Jason and David have been running this company together for so long "staying" together without killing each other business wise (so to speak) is an example of how good you are at leading the way by what you preach and that basecamp has teamwork in its DNA, not only in its code but also in its creators.
I admire their respect for time. They don’t waste it like I often do. Bravo gents.
Great move! I love the thought on how important it is to look at the business with fresh eyes - what have we become so used to we don't realize is something we need to look at?
$99 for a solo business, I was not able to pay however now I am loving the new pricing for me. Basecamp rock!
I'm really glad you made this change. The 2-3 person teams, especially when just forming a new company, will be without any income, before their product or service is launched and has a chance to make it in the marketplace. I'm doing that just now. I don't want to overspend on tools during that period.
Also I think you'll need to give it more time than just until the end of the year, to really see the uptick in subscriptions. It's going to take some time before the target audience that chose other tools during the $99 period will notice the change or give Basecamp another look. You should even consider advertising it more heavily.
Last thing, it's awesome you allow customers to stay on the plan they originally signed up for, under the same terms, when you make these changes. It builds trust.
I can not stomach listing to you anymore. My job is to find another too. I woke up this AM as your biggest fan.
This is a really great video, thanks for sharing guys. The intro says it all, it's great to provide extra detail from specific discussions/decisions, to compliment the more meta conversations from other sources. Congratulations!
Loved listening to this! Been a HEY user since the beginning and always wanted to use Basecamp for my freelancing business but couldn't afford the $99. Been using Basecamp with recent clients and it's been exactly what I was looking for. Love this new pricing model and hope it stays!
Thanks Luke! The experiment is ongoing so we'll see! -JF
Really good stuff. I'd love to see more talks about pricing.
I've heard about Basecamp for nearly over 15 years but always turned away because the pricing didn't make sense for me (working mostly as a Solo-Preneur with a few Outsourced Contractors from time to time). However, when I saw the new pricing structure, I immediately signed up to give it a try... Now, it looks like I'll be a customer for quite some time ; )
Thank you guys for this 🙏🏻 good and informative conversation. The 99 plan was a bit heavy for my workflow and free version too limiting although I have I always LOVED using Basecamp ever since version 2. Signed up instantly when I found about this new plan!
I stopped using Basecamp when it wen to $99 a month. As a solo freelancer I just could not justify it. I have started frrelancing more and need a good management platform and when I saw the new pricing I decided to join.
Thanks for the discussion. It was interesting to see you two, although David was probably not looking at Jason during the talk, as he pointed out in one of the recent rework episodes. ;-)
I would prefer to have these discussions in the podcast, (It doesn't have to be rework, it could be a new one) since you didn't have any visuals to show. I mean if you show some functionality in Basecamp or Hey it totally makes sense to have a video but if you don't, listening to your voices is enough for me.
As an individual freelance developer I couldn't bring myself to pay $99 just for myself it was too much. I had a free account but found it was too limited. I'm super excited about this change. I closed my free account and signed up for a "new" account to get this pricing. Because while $99 was too much $11 is very reasonable.
Great conversation. I thought you guys would go into the free plan you used to have.
Thanks for this great conversation!
Just to chip in: Jason's got a point about getting the word out. I found out about this price drop completely by accident when browsing Jason's tweets. I'm an old customer: we used to use Basecamp at my previous job, and I wanted check in what you guys are up to. Now, there's a lot of small social media creators who I think would benefit from using Basecamp in running their small media businesses (think video production, brand deals, merch, etc.) but who haven't even heard about Basecamp.
Amazing content! Thanks guys!
That was great.
I’d be interested in hearing how you think about adding new features without increasing the complexity of the whole product too much (both as a user and in the design + code)
Big fan of these talks! Going even deeper on metrics related to these bigger strategic moves would be nice, but I guess there's a limit to what you can (and want to) share. Curious what software you used to host the meeting and record?
Thanks! We recorded audio/video on Zencastr. They offer a split screen right out of the box. Record, get the MOV file, upload right to UA-cam. No editing. -JF
Fascinating insights. Thanks. Sometimes too much brain power hides the obvious. $99 is too hefty a leap for small outfits and freelancers, and way too cheap for big organisations. We're a small team with big clients/ Now signed up on the new per user plan and will be introducing big clients as part of our projects. If they like it who knows how the network continues to grow. Good Luck :-)
With the rise of the creator economy I think Basecamp is great for a content creator managing their content.
Great stuff. For future videos: you know better which decisions were the toughest. Start with them, my 2 cents
Really enjoyed this thanks gents!
I met basecamp in the first advertising agency that I worked as a web developer.
I hated it, but not for basecamp per se. What happened is that we did not have a logical methodology on how to use it correctly.
Today I have been super dependent on basecamp for 2 years. It is my brain and my way of communicating certain topics with certain clients.
In the way I use it, which is more than anything with my clients, it is much cheaper, new cost version, because I can practically have a single user and many clients at a minimum price.
Though I hope the old plan will at least hold for us old folks. Well, I'm used to paying. Since in this way you do not think about the account going up or down. A single price maintains peace of mind.
A cost-per-customer type hybrid plan capped at $99.00 but that's just an opinion. I understand that they must have costs involved in these decisions.
Love the new pricing 👍
This pricing benefits a lot of newbie freelancers or very small and low income agencies (1-5 people), which I also think are the ones who will benefit greatly with Basecamp. I'm currently experimenting on adding it on my project management system :)
Great discussion. Very interesting. Would be great to hear more about product development ... why you decided on the various new Basecamp 4 features? ... why you decided to launch Hey?
I got fucked on this pricing change. I was an existing customer paying $1,000/yr and these two multimillionaires refused just change my pricing to 'per user' (just two of us/small business). Had to cancel everything and start over with a new account to get the new pricing. It's hard to take these two seriously after that.
Woooo! I can finally afford Basecamp. 😍
A few people said it was a good value and a steal, so we knew we just had to milk every penny out of these suckers... Thanks guys
"Introduce risk into your business" 👈 That there is a FUCKING awesome quote! 32:45
Excellent
Now that it's actually affordable for small biz or solopreneurs, I hope that after the pricing experiment, that it stays this way. Hate to invest with a lot of projects and tasks only to have to start looking again for another tool come January
Darrin, if you sign up on this plan, we'll honor it even if we decide to end the experiment for new customers down the road. Anyone who signs up now gets this offering even if we stop offering it. -JF
@@37signals that is great to hear! Thank you for that.
I just need Hey Personal Monthly and Family plans and I'm all set. 🥰 I just pay for a year and monthly for my family account
Ok I locked in my $11 per month :)
I hope we get notice if you are going to increase existing customers, so we can cancel our two accounts. I have a saying, don't fix what is not broken. So disappointed.
Hey Jim... No plans to do anything with existing customers at this point. Just an experiment for new customers. If, and that's a big if, we decide to stick with this pricing (or some variation on it), we'll offer very fair transition options for customers. In 18 years, we've only changed prices a few times, and we've always made it a very fair transition. -JF
I don’t think they are changing prices for existing customers.
Why do you corporate thought leaders and decision makers have to needlessly use the F-word and other profanity in your dialogue? David sounds like a crass unpolished little junior high school boy with a filthy mouth. It really is unprofessional and off-putting -- and most especially, unnecessary!
Because people talk like that, and these are two guys talking. Fuck is a word like any other word, the profanity is in your mind and the way you described David, says more about you than anyone else
@@MrMouxy What happened to civility and manners and speaking in an appropriate way -- especially in a corporate setting?
The profanity is not in my mind, it is based in the mores of our culture and society.
Try looking up the word in a dictionary or online and you will find that it is described as obscene or vulgar.
@@tommypain Who cares dude, let go of the bourgeoise mindset
@@user-ti9zc1xv2b Who cares? For one, I care. And I would imagine many more others, too. Take your profanity out to the street and the back alleys. It does not belong in the corporate world, as it only minimizes the credibility of the user and the professionalism of the company for which he or she works..
I haven't watched the site for a while to know exactly what the various pricing options were and unless you listen closely you think Basecamp has always been $99/mo. This, as was discussed late in the video, isn't the case. There was a time when more entry-level plan(s) was/were available.
So this isn't so much a "we woke up and decided to try something new" as it's a change to the price list - accompanied by a 45 minute video instead of a boring email about how inflation is the devil that made us do it.
Three ways to make more money according to Jay Abraham:
a. More customers. (which I think is the intent here)
b. Repeat business with those customers.
c. Sell higher ticket products to those customers to increase revenue. (which is likely a 3 to 5 year object - get more customers then start raising each user x %)
For me - I find most of my customers (computer/financial software consultant here) are reluctant to participate as users in a project management system. I think their attitude has largely been "hey, we hired you to do the work so you keep your own project management notes". For me as a small business, this new pricing would be cheaper. My plan B would be to start tracking most of the info I track in Basecamp in Google Workspace ( I already have Todoist for tasks and Google Drive for files ).
My overriding concern is this becomes about lock-in. Which is a trend with many applications.
- Increase the number of subscribers
- Start increasing the pricing once they're in
The trend online across many companies in this space is they get a customer to put so much data into the system and rely on it so much that once price increases start happening regularly the customer needs to do a cost vs benefit ROI analysis of moving all their data out of an existing system ( like Basecamp ) vs finding something else which might be cheaper.
I hear the objection already - "yeah but $x per month per user would be cheaper than $99 per month now" and that's presently true.
But it might not be true if the Per User / Per Month price rapidly rise or changes or rises x% every few years.
Hey Wayne. Yes - we've seen companies do that over and over. No one likes that. That's not been our path, and we have 18 years of experience to show for that. We don't lock customers in (no long-term contracts, you can export your data at any time, etc), we don't frequently changes prices on customers (it's been ~7 years since we've explored prices at all), etc. In fact, we still have customers on Basecamp Classic - the original version from 2004 - paying us the same prices from way back when because we never required anyone to upgrade or move to a new version. We go above and beyond to be fair and thoughtful, and I think our record shows that we are. -JF