The Ideal
As a developer tool our ideal would be to charge in the same way as AWS.
We like only paying for what we use at the end of the month. We'd love to be able to offer the same to our customers. But the reality is that huge amounts of AWS income comes from low-risk enterprise customers making long-term commitments.
We want to be investing our time in improving our product, not negotiating contracts or implementing complex billing systems.
Our old pricing was a compromise that didn't get the balance right.
The Result
We don't think it's a coincidence that since changing our prices we've:
- Grown our customer base by 32%
- Shot past 100 million successful renders per year.
- Added revenue faster than ever before.
- Kept revenue churn well under 2%.
This has given us the confidence to grow our team of dedicated screenshot engineers without depending on outside funding.
We think our new pricing works better for both us and our customers.
Old Pricing
Previously we charged a fixed monthly fee plus overage.
There were three usage levels to choose from. Each of them had almost identical feature sets. The overage fee was charged at the end of a customer's billing period.
It was OK for customers just getting started but the plans weren't a good fit for high-volume customers.
That old pricing also left us carrying too much risk.
When customers had high overage and then failed to pay we still had the infrastructure costs to pay. Increasing amounts of revenue coming from unpredictable overages also meant we couldn't plan like other SaaS. As a result there were times that we under-invested in infrastructure and the product.
We don't have the resources of Amazon or a VC backed startup to balance this up.
Since we changed our pricing we've seen some well funded, resource intensive developer tools make big changes to their billing pricing.
Planet Scale discontinued their free tier. OpenAI now requires pre-payment. Vercel's "Improved infrastructure pricing" resulted in huge increases for many customers.
Thankfully we've received positive feedback about the changes we've made.
The Goal
We wanted to achieve four things:
- Fair.
- Predictable.
- Sustainable.
- Simple.
We think we've achieved three out of four.
Fair
We now have three different plans that align with the needs of different kinds of customers.
LoFi is for customers who are primarily generating images from HTML they're developing themselves along with thumbnails of 3rd party sites. They rarely need our advanced features or significant amounts of support.
HiFi is for customers who are taking screenshots of a mix of 3rd party websites and their own HTML. They want the accuracy and reliability Urlbox customers rave about.
Ultra is for customers who want the best of the best in web imaging free from constraints. All features and priority support that feels like they've hired their own dedicated web rendering team.
From side projects to enterprise solutions or somewhere between the two there's a plan for you.
Predictable
We now have public pricing that shows costs all the way up to 1 million renders per month.
Pick a plan and use the slider on our pricing page. You'll be able to see exactly what you'll pay as you grow. The effective rate per render automatically drops by up to 68% as use increases.
And there are further discounts for annual commitments.
Sustainable
It's easier for customers to grow with us.
You don't have to make huge jumps in spend commitment to get the best price. You can see how the cost of Urlbox stacks up against creating your own in-house rendering team. We can invest faster in continuously improving the service.
You can be even more confident in depending on us in the long term.
Simple(ish)
It's not as simple as having a flat rate per successful render.
It's been a pain getting it working nicely in Stripe. But this approach is far simpler than many of the alternatives. You don't have to think in terms of bandwidth costs, storage costs, compute time or some form of abstract credit.
We have built in incentives to continuously improve performance.
While new customers have been signing up on these new plans for almost a year, and others have proactively switched, most are still on our legacy plans. Some have been on the same plan for over a decade! That means we have much more complexity in our billing code than we would like. We're now in the process of transitioning all customers to new pricing. We can't wait to delete our legacy billing code and get back to focusing on improving accuracy, performance and all the other things you'd expect from an API enterprises consider to be a critical part of their infrastructure.
Overall we think this new pricing is a win-win for customers and us. We'd love to see more of the services we use introduce similar plans.
