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Two and a half weeks ago, we’ve launched our Zootool PRO Membership. Because our users choose the price for it, we got a lot of requests if we could release some numbers how this is going.

First of all we want to thank all users who signed up for a PRO Membership so far. We got so many positive feedback for it and the last weeks couldn’t have been more motivating for us!

When we started thinking about the pricing model, we always had something in mind like the $24 per year for Flickr or the $19 per year for Dribbble PRO. We wanted it to be easy. We didn’t want to offer a silver, bronze, gold, platinum, diamond, super-beautiful diamond with whipped cream on top of it plan.

But it was super difficult to come up with a final amount for it. Will people pay $19 or even $24 per year? Would some of them pay more? What if we set the amount to $24 but nobody signs up for it?

Let’s be honest. 60,000 users is not Flickr – it’s not even close!! We are still tiny and we are proud of it! And let’s be honest once more: the total amount of users is meaningless. The count of active users is what it is all about and we got about 6k active users. I hear people say “That’s only 10% active users, why are you still running this?” — because we love it, because we’ve got plenty of awesome plans for it, because there are 6k users who count on Zootool and because being tiny is awesome!

The web has become a place where only big numbers are relevant (*cough* bubble *cough*) but being tiny allows us to run Zootool for almost four years in a row as a side project without any problems. We’ve all got great jobs, so we don’t need Zootool to generate any extra money. We’ve got low hosting costs, so our ads pretty much pay our bills. We don’t have a big shiny office. We don’t have company cars. We’ve got 100% freedom to run Zootool the way we love it.

With that in mind, we finally ditched the plan to have a fixed price for our PRO Membership and went for an (almost) completely free pricing model. Letting users choose between $1 and $100 per year means that everyone should be able to find the perfect price.

We hoped for about 100 paying users in the first month and we got no idea how much they would pay. Germans are pessimists and Nicolas told me that French are pessimists too, so those were pretty low expectations. On the other hand you won’t be disappointed that way :)

Actually we reached 100 paying users within the first two hours and after the first day we had 270 new pro users paying about $3000. Right now – two and a half weeks later – we got 456 pro users who paid $4140. That is an average of about $9 per account per year.

We were absolutely mind-blown by this!! $9 might sound pretty low, but it’s actually not. We’ve got 126 users, who paid $1 and 145 users who paid something between $2 and $5. This means that 59% of our pro users paid $5 or less. But the other 184 users (41%) paid $3329! So actually 41% or our users paid an average of 18$.

Is this a bad thing? No, it’s not!! It really shows that we are going the right way. We are pretty sure that everyone who spent $5 or less would have never signed up for Zootool PRO at all if we would have charged $20 or more.

A lot of users are giving the PRO features a try for a small amount to see if they are worth it at all, which is absolutely cool. A lot of users simply can’t afford to pay more and it’s so awesome to see that they still want to support us. And some users even just signed up, because they liked our pricing model so much – how great is that?

On the other hand we were so happy to see some of our big supporters, who paid much more than we’d ever expected. This means the world to us and is a huge motivation boost.

Will we get rich with this? Definitely not! The additional money we generate with PRO accounts will entirely be spent for Zootool. It’s really all about being able to move on, making Zootool better and keep it running. A bookmark service is something, which people rely on and so our goal is to make it last.

We are very excited about the first two and a half weeks and we can’t wait for the coming months.

Thanks again for all your support. You guys rock!

Cheers,
Bastian, Habu, Nicolas