During the past weeks we have been working on our pricing plans and features. The process has been complex and one of the biggest issues was to make sure that our pricing was ok with the current market. This step was essential to see if the whole business was a good idea or not.
Our pricing is not about subscribers or limits, but then how do you compare this when the other platforms give you a price based on subscribers?
And if we were having that problem to compare the pricing, our clients (hello you that are reading us) will have the same problem! So it was important to solve this for us but also for you (so you can purchase our service, so it is for us again ;)).
The Spreadsheet
So we decided to investigate and answer the question, and how do you solve this? Well, we do this “The engineering way”: making a spreadsheet. 😉
So we made a spreadsheet, a big spreadsheet.
We visited the main providers, play with their fancy sliders and take all the pricing based on subscribers. We started with 2k, then 4k, 8k, 10k, you get the idea.
And we decided to go up to 256k subscribers, which is a nice good big number.
And then we realised, it is not the same to send 20k subscribers one email each month or 4 (if you have a weekly newsletter for example), as that will be 80k emails per month.
Our plans do not change due to the number of subscribers, but the emails that you send are not included. Those emails are really cheap, but they are not free, so it is important, if you want to compare the real pricing, to take this into account.
How many emails do you send?
It depends of the newsletter you have. So we added 4 options to the spreadsheet, sending 1 email per month, sending 2, sending 5 and sending 10 emails per month to all your subscribers. We wanted to consider all the options here.
So the big spreadsheet grew, and it was now a huge spreadsheet, and we went again into the providers (most of them) and we made sure that their pricing did not change when you send more emails per month (and sometimes they do). We adjusted it the best we could.
Some providers requires to contact them for huge number of subscribers, which is ok. We left those spaces empty on the spreadsheet.
The full huge spreadsheet is here for your to check and enjoy, and we will be updating it in the future with more providers.
Go to the SpreadSheet on Google Docs.
This is what you need to know about the spreadsheet:
- The column Min Price show the minimum price for all providers (except Sendock).
- Sendock+AWS consider the price of Sendock and the cost of sending those emails using AWS. This will be your own AWS account, so this is just for comparison.
- On Green is when the price is cheaper on Sendock that on any other provider. On red is the opposite.
- Also on Green are the providers that have the best pricing for that number of subcribers and emails without considering Sendock.
You will also see another tab, so you can see quickly the cost of sending one 1 email per month and compare.
Of course this is only talking about price, so it does not compare the different features for all the providers and Sendock. Each platform has its own set of features that are important and different.
On Sendock as you already know, the approach is different, but now you can check the pricing in case you needed another reason to choose us.
Conclusions
Looking only about the price, Sendock is cheaper when you reach 10k subscribers, no matter how many emails you send per month.
If you are around 8k, the price is similar to Mailerlite new pricing, and it is up to you if the difference on features make sense to you.
For 4k to 8k, it depends which will you compare. Again, here the price won´t be much of a difference and it will be down to the difference of features and business model.
For less than 4k subscribers, you won´t save money moving it to Sendock, but you may want to have better privacy and control.
So, does this make sense to you? Please leave a comment on Twitter.