Everything is really hassle-free. Support is great. Print quality is superb.
But they are still new and obviously a lot of rooms to improve:
- Cheaper international shipping rate (currently sets at $13.45 to ship outside UK/US/Canada).
- Print magazine subscription option.
- API
Is there any competition in this space? What other alternatives are there besides MagCloud?
What happens when you get beyond the current price you are at, which seems to be about the most people would be willing to pay? What is your next step when you hit 50+ pages?
I don't know of any direct competition. Digital printing seems to have become cheep enough to make this feasible.
I've been thinking about the possibility of a EU clone that produces and especially ships locally, and supports other languages etc. If you want to discuss this idea, I'd be happy to hear from any HN users.
One weakness I saw with MagCloud's pricing model is they do not seem to allow the publisher to set a price that is lower than the sum of the per-page costs. So you can't directly subsidize the price for the consumer, say with your advertising revenue. They currently require you to pass the full page-based cost on to the person who buys a printed issue. So large page counts make the issue price pretty high, possibly pricing you out of many markets because of it.
This inflexibility may be the cost of getting the overall convenience of the service, but it's the biggest disadvantage I've seen so far when considering it for my own business ideas.
The content and pricing looks great but their iPad app leaves quite a lot to be desired - you can't read long titles, no subcategories and there is no grouping of individual magazines.
http://www.magcloud.com/