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John PescodI tried twice using different email accounts to start a trial of the premium version. Both times after pressing the activation key in the email and logging in after entering the (correct!) password, I got an immediate message that “Your premium subscription has expired and you can therefore no longer edit or create new password entries. However, you still have read-only access.”
John PescodHello John,
Thank you for the input. Things seem so clear when we design them, but there’s always room for improvement.
All ‘Premium’ links should perhaps go to the ‘Try Premium’ function. It’s hard, we dont’ want to have too many text boxes and decisions like ‘Do you really want to Try Premium now?’ etc. So we have just one link for the trial.
Do you see this?
John PescodHello Svante
No, that “Try Premium” link is not visible. It’s probably because something went wrong both times after I logged in the first time. I immediately got the message that my trial period was finished even before I started.
After receiving the email with the 6 number activation code, it was also not clear what I should do with it. Was it supposed to be used as the password the first time? I eventually clicked on the link in the email and then I had to make my password and confirm it. Now I come to think of it, I had not yet installed the program because I thought this might be an app that runs in the cloud. Perhaps I needed to download the software first and then activate it?
Personally I think it would be easier and more beneficial in the long run for you to give everyone who downloads the program automatically the Premium version with all functions active which is valid for 3 months. After that users need to pay to retain the premium functions, or they get downgraded to the free version. Many software companies use this tactic.
Another thing you should SERIOUSLY think about is to lower the price to a max. $1 per month. I realise that this is 50% lower than your 12 month subscription price and that the costs of collection will also be (much?) higher, but the 1$ per month is a price point that is almost “painless” for most people. I would use $1 per month with an opt-out at any time, no questions asked. Not to upset your current subscribers, you could lengthen their subscription by 12 months so they don’t feel disadvantaged.
I had a friend who started up internet hosting in the USA 15 years ago, and he told me that he only started to make real money when he dropped his monthly subscription to 1$ per month (actually it was 99c) which was very cheap in those days. He told me that it took him a long time to make the move towards a pricing structure that he thought was “too low” to be profitable, but after he introduced the change his turnover went from a few thousand dollars per month to over 1 million per month in less than 12 months! 2 years later he was taken over by a much larger hosting company and he retired.
The costs of your development have already been made and your fixed costs are probably fairly rigid, but your variable costs do not increase proportionally with the number of software downloads. Actually I’m sure that your financial collection costs for each subscription are much, much higher than the unit cost of the software per user. So it’s a question of getting your program adopted and used by as many people as possible which will also lower the % you have to pay to PayPal / Credit card companies.
If 20 million people have downloaded your software over the years, you must have (hopefully) a huge list of email addresses to promote a new “killer” pricing structure. The new functions in your program should help you achieve this goal.
Bests regards,
John
John Pescod
John Pescod
John PescodI have installed Axcrypt (32bit) on my old laptop running Windows 7. Using the password I created on my desktop pc (still away being upgraded with new SSD) I could use the program’s Premium functions – it seemed to have no problem to connect to your server.
However I have noticed one thing. When an encrypted file is opened in the program, it comes into the list of recent files. However, if I then close this file and delete it using Axcrypt, it is not possible to remove it from the list. When I choose the option, “Stop securing and remove from list” I get a popup saying it is already open in another application, when this is impossible I had closed this file and deleted it using Axcrypt. The same thing happened when I chose the other option, “Remove from list but keep file secured”. Eventually I managed to clear a couple of the files from the recent file list by trying the options several times, but there is still one that refuses to be removed. It seems as if the interface is not being updated even though it was Axcrypt that deleted the file.
