At the risk of being negative, can I just say that for me, as a consumer or customer, when companies start offering lifetime deals for a one-time fee, it's a huge red flag.
Why? Because often it's a desperate move done by a company to generate cash flow. It's not ultimately sustainable either. Theoretically you could be providing that same service 10+ years down the track. You might (reasonably) assume some attrition in the time but you get my point.
Too many times I've seen this done as a company's last move before filing for bankruptcy. Disclaimer: I'm speaking generally here. I know nothing of Mixpanel's circumstances (financial or otherwise) and certainly don't mean to impugn them, their management team, their founders or their employees.
Providing a free service is different. Typically this is done as a "freemium" model where you hope a certain percentage of free users will later convert to paying users. People know this and have a different level of expectation than for something they've paid for, even if that something is a nominal one-off fee (you and they may also disagree about what constitutes "nominal").
As a paid service, due to consumer protection, etc you may have to meet a higher standard but IANAL.
> Because often it's a desperate move done by a company to generate cash flow
I think that in this case that's not what's happening. These kind of deals(a la groupon) are to generate awareness about the brand, and hopefully future clients, and not to generate money.
More likely, they will soon raise their free limits or make more levels free, hence the offer will slowly loose its value over time (but still a good deal if you use it in the next year or two, depending on how fast the above happens).
Hey guys this has gotten out of hand - we were doing it manually initially but it won't scale. I'm going to write some code to automate it and the appsumo guys will email with confirmation codes in the morning.
Sorry for the delay, anyone who bought it and hasn't heard back from us yet.
I bought the startup plan some 10 hours ago, sent in an email but never received any follow up.
I've just checked my Appsumo account and see that the startup plan has been downgraded to basic. Will customers after the 1000 mark get anything or are you guys planning to refund?
(I think also think it is wrong of you guys to modify invoices which is supposed to be a record and agreement of a transaction.)
I am with you, bought it 9 hours ago.
I just checked my invoice now and the content indeed modified from "startup plan" into "basic plan".
for the record, when I buy it, it was still "startup plan" and it still showed me that i bought 500k points in startup plan.
I hope someone from mixpanel can answer this, i think it is very wrong to change invoice content like this.
I've noticed the same thing. While I understand the need to limit liability, I'm not happy about the bait and switch. I'm sure it doesn't build the goodwill that they were hoping for...
Also noticed the change to my invoice this morning when I went to evangelize this deal with my boss and co-workers. Not such a great deal IMO now that it's only 100k. Also the mention here that if I ever go over that number (now 100k down from 500k), my lifetime account is forfeit* ? Who do I need to contact to get a few questions answered?
I just wanted to update the above:
I got my registration code and while the email and new invoice said basic plan, I have 510k events/m in my account now after using the code. I couldn't be happier about this, thank you guys so much!
Doh, didn't realize that! Ah well, I guess I'm only getting basic :-( I don't even have a project underhand now, I just figure it will be useful for the future.
For other people on the fence, I'd suggest getting this now while you still can! I loved using Mixpanel in the past (although, I did think it was a bit pricey ;-)). The fact that I could send in events from my server made it far superior to GA. It meant that I could, for example, build funnels for emails I was sending out (send -> open -> click -> completion). Their HTTP API was easy enough to use that I wrote my own lisp (drakma-based) library to interact with it in under a few hours.
They used to have some scaling pains (multiple days delay on getting data processed), but that was all fixed towards the end. The support is great too - I got Suhail on the phone instantly when I was having trouble with something.
Exceeding your data plan will result in either a prorated overage charge based on your plan's current cost per point, or an automatic plan upgrade. We will always choose the cheaper option.
Hmmm this is a bit worrying.. rather than just stopping tracking they just charge you more
According to their twitter account, it's a single one-time fee (http://twitter.com/AppSumo). I just got upgraded, and now I have 510k free data points to play with!
Did Noah do the "$1500 value" thingy on appsumo.com? I'm interested in where that figure came from, it doesn't seem to make any sense if this is a one time fee for the $150/m account.
If you have a credit card form there on the page, why are you requiring a PayPal account? I was going to get this deal, but since PayPal is being a bit of an asshole to me personally, I can not. Can there be another way?
I just bought it after talking to Noah on the site's chat for a bit. The PayPal account bit is optional (I just entered CC info, no account, although PayPal may still be the payment processor).
Good catch Max. I'd initially assumed it was $17 one-time from the headline, but given that the normal cost of this plan is $150/month $17/month seems more likely.
I think that a feature request for AppSumo would be a Deal Counter. The idea would be that once a deal hits a specific threshold (say 100), the deal would begin to advertise that there are X number remaining. This would avoid any confusion about what people are purchasing and a way to entice people to purchase.
This is a great deal no doubt.. But don't see the benefit of choosing Mixpanel over Google Analytics. The one thing I see different is that Mixpanel can break the chart down to the hour.
I signed up for the startup plan yesterday and followed the instructions that appsumo sent off to me, but my account has yet to be upgraded. My initial email to the mixpanel server keeps bouncing back. Has anyone else had this issue?
The majority of website owners refuse to pay for analytics, and instead opt for GA. I think we're seeing the effects of this with heavy discounts for low traffic sites from both KissMetrics and MixPanel.
I registered, then emailed saying "hey, I signed up for the appsumo deal, invoice ID is... and my email address is..." and they got back to me within 30 mins with my upgraded account :)
I agree. Not clear at all. I bought the deal from appsumo, registered an account on mixpanel and emailed "free+appsumo@mixpanel.com" from the same email. Will see if it works.
Why? Because often it's a desperate move done by a company to generate cash flow. It's not ultimately sustainable either. Theoretically you could be providing that same service 10+ years down the track. You might (reasonably) assume some attrition in the time but you get my point.
Too many times I've seen this done as a company's last move before filing for bankruptcy. Disclaimer: I'm speaking generally here. I know nothing of Mixpanel's circumstances (financial or otherwise) and certainly don't mean to impugn them, their management team, their founders or their employees.
Providing a free service is different. Typically this is done as a "freemium" model where you hope a certain percentage of free users will later convert to paying users. People know this and have a different level of expectation than for something they've paid for, even if that something is a nominal one-off fee (you and they may also disagree about what constitutes "nominal").
As a paid service, due to consumer protection, etc you may have to meet a higher standard but IANAL.