Two years ago, we first released Woobius to just four people. It was a very early version of Woobius – it only had a Dropbox, had no audit log, barebones user management. You couldn’t even send files by email. But it solved a real problem, and people started using it, and it spread.
Within a year, with no advertising, Woobius grew from 0 to 1700 users. Now, after another year, it is approaching 6000, with users from over 60 different countries. This all happened while the construction industry was shaken to its roots by a nasty recession. Needless to say, we’re very proud of this.
Through this journey, we’ve learned a lot about what you, our users, want. When we officially launched in June last year, we believed that a per-project pricing model was the best model for this industry. As I’ll discuss a little lower in this blog post, this proved to be untrue – we received clear feedback that people wanted a different model.
So, the main news in this announcement is, we are upgrading our pricing model to something that will work better for both you and us.
This pricing will come into effect over the weekend of February 20th.
What will the new pricing be?
The new pricing is based around the idea that when people decide to adopt Woobius in earnest, they want to adopt it on many (often all) the projects that their firm is involved in. Woobius makes collaboration more convenient, and this is true even if you’re the only one using it on your project.
With the new model, you still get free projects with 200 MB of storage, but each user can only own one project. When a user decides they want to adopt Woobius on more projects, they can upgrade their user account, rather than upgrading the projects individually. All their projects then benefit from the additional storage instantly.
The following table lists the different plans, in Pounds Sterling, that will be available when you upgrade:
Of course, if you’re not based in the UK, you can purchase those in US Dollars or Euros.
Other than this, there will be no change to your experience of working with Woobius.
Why does this make more sense?
People adopt Woobius through three distinct stages. These stages are repeated across most of our users. Sometimes new users go through those stages very quickly, but a typical length of time is a few weeks.
In the first stage, users are passive. They have been invited to a project or have signed up but are not actively using the system. They may be downloading files, and even uploading some files, but they’re not actively creating real construction projects.
In the second stage, users become active. They start to create their own projects and actively use Woobius to collaborate with their design team or contrators. Typically, though, they only do this on one or two projects, to try the system out and convince themselves that it works.
In the third stage, users are convinced that the system is right for them and their company, and they want get their whole company to adopt it. This is where the previous pricing model doesn’t quite work – by requiring every project to be upgraded independently, and to have their own sets of invoices and payment schedules, it wasn’t supporting users who wanted to adopt Woobius for all their projects.
The new system still supports stages 1 and 2 – the system is free for 1 project up to 200MB, and cheap if you only have a few projects. But now, when you want to adopt Woobius across many projects in your company, there’s a simple, easy way to do so.
Looking forwards
I hope that this new system will work well for both you and us. It’s been a really phenomenal two years so far, and I’m really enthusiastic about what the future holds.
If you have any comments about the new pricing, please feel free to email us or to post a comment below.
