We are pleased to announce that OfficeDrop is making a positive change to our pricing model – we are replacing our 60 day free trial with a new, “free forever” plan. In the SaaS world, this is called a “freemium” pricing strategy.* Our new customers have been pretty clear that they are interested in growing into a paying plan over time, and prefer this type of a free plan to our existing 60 day free trial option.

No Changes for Existing Users

Existing paying users will not have any changes to their pricing! Even if you are still on one of our “value” plans from 2008, you’ll still have the same service as you had before. The new pricing only impacts new users to the service.

The New Free Plan

The new free plan will include the following:

• Top 3 search results – OfficeDrop’s document search engine will return the top three results for your search queries. Of course, you can always use labels, folders and additional search words to narrow down the result to find the documents you are looking for.
• 1 GB of searchable storage – The free plan will come with 1 GB of cloud storage, so you can have access to a decent amount of paper and digital files where ever, whenever. This amount is much more storage than the average amount used by a free trial user, so we hope this encourages new free users to put a large amount into the OfficeDrop system.
• Limited OCR – A free OfficeDrop account will turn up to 50 scanned pages (i.e. uploaded PDFs) into text searchable PDFs using OCR. Our customer tell us that the OCR we provide is one of the most important features of an OfficeDrop account, so we wanted to make sure that our free users could take advantage of this great service.
• Single scanvelope – For users wishing to try out OfficeDrop’s mail in scanning service, the free plan allows for a single scanvelope. Simply put in your mailing address (US only) within the first month of signing up and we’ll send you one postage prepaid scanvelope, which you can fill with your paper and drop in the mail. Once we receive the envelope, we’ll scan the contents and upload the files as text searchable PDFs and either return the paper to you or shred them (your choice.) Just like our paid plans, the free envelope is for 50 pages. We think this is a great way for you to see the quality of our mail in scanning service. If you want additional prepaid scanvelopes you’ll have to upgrade to a paid mail-in scanning plan.
• Support – OfficeDrop is now offering several levels of support, and the free plan will have access to our online support at support.officedrop.com

Free Trial on Everything

We are also making changes to our free trial. Existing users in our free trial will not be impacted by this change – only new users. When a new customer signs up for a paid plan they will have a 14 day free trial. Their credit card will be charged on the 15th day after sign up (all times and days are in U.S Eastern time zone). This means that you can cancel anytime before 14 days and no be charged anything. Your ordinary monthly billing cycle will begin after the 14th day.**

Why We Are Making the Change

At OfficeDrop, we believe that our software can really help small businesses manage their paper and digital files more efficiently. We want to get our service into the hands of as many business owners as possible, since we think they’ll like what they see! Going to a free plan will hopefully encourage people to download the software or sign up online and see what OfficeDrop can do for their businesses.

OfficeDrop has been growing very quickly recently, and a huge amount of this growth has been through our downloadable applications, like the OfficeDrop Android application or ScanDrop Mac Scanner Software. People who find our service in these application marketplaces expect there to be a free forever version of the service, and it seems that most of the one star reviews we get in these app stores is from people upset that they have only a 60 day trial with OfficeDrop.*** While it’s not really clear why they are surprised about our free trial, since the app descriptions are very clear about it, what is obvious is that our pricing model is hurting our reviews. And since we know that potential customers do look at the number of stars prior to trying out an application the number of stars really matter.

If you have questions on our new pricing give us an email at support (at) officedrop (dot) com. We hope we can help you go paperless!

* We fully intend to offer a free forever plan for as long as our company exists! It’s crazy, but that’s what we want to do. You can help us make this work by telling your fellow business owners about the service and helping us make the free plan successful. Of course, like any business, we reserve the right to change this free policy at some point, but we fully intend to be a trusted partner to your business and make this free forever plan work. Note that there will be some minor changes to our terms of service agreement in the near future due to this change (and the fact that we haven’t updated them in a few years.)

** We’ve always been pretty flexible with this free trial period, and if you are a free trial user and need more time to test out the service just send us and email and we’ll be happy to give you additional free time.

*** At first this really annoyed us – we make it super clear in the app listings that you get a 60 day free trial – why were people upset or surprised and leaving nasty reviews? If they didn’t want a product with a  free trial, why did they download the app in the first place?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2011 at 1:32 pm and is filed under OfficeDrop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.