3 takeaways from Nozbe pricing saga

We’re reaching the end of June and in a few days we’ll be switching on the new Nozbe prices (starting from July 3 - Monday). I spent the whole month of June writing about it, reaching out to customers and sharing the details behind the whole process. It’s been a roller coaster 🎢 ride and here are my few takeaways from all this. It’s all there - the blood, tears of joy and over-sharing:

Note: this is a transcript of the email Newsletter I sent to my 1000+ subscribers a while back. If you want to be one of them, sign up for my free Newsletter. You can unsubscribe anytime!

First off, Nozbe customers are awesome!

The decision to raise and change prices was hard. Nobody likes change. And especially when it comes to money, but our customers reacted beautifully. With understanding and support. More than 1000 customers extended their accounts at their old prices, and some for many years to come. And the ones who didn’t, wrote us messages like this one:

Thank you for the offer, I will not make use of it though… I am very much prepared to pay the extra: Nozbe helps me and my company so much :) Good luck with all your ventures (and dreams).

Or this:

The [Nozbe] software is great, but the company attitude and how Michael makes it personal. That’s golden.

After 16 years of running Nozbe, I can’t be more excited about the next decades of serving such users! ❤️

Second, I went really deep behind the process - I wrote a lot!

My daughter laughs that my job is writing random stuff on the Internet and this was one of these months that I wrote a lot. It’s good that I bought myself an ergonomic keyboard to help me write!

I started off with the story behind Nozbe pricing changes - how to do it while rewarding long-time customers and betting on the future.

Later I went deeper and…

I shared 5 principles that guided my design of the new pricing as I wanted to explain how I believe a business should be charging customers per user per month while offering them savings and keeping everything fair and square.

Like it wasn’t enough, I shared also…

A new concept of Pay-less upgrade - how to make plan changes for customers completely effortless, where I shared the exact formula we use when we calculate account changes in a fair and transparent way.

As I mentioned in my previous Newsletter, sharing is caring and I wanted to share all these details not only to explain our rationale behind pricing changes, but also to make sure it’s transparent to everyone. I also hope some fellow business owners would learn from our experiences.

Third, I’m so happy I get to do this!

It’s a great time to be alive. Now as the June is coming to an end, I’m much more hopeful for the future, knowing that I’ll get to serve my customers for years to come while at the same time I’ll keep appreciating technology behind all this.

If you’re not tired of hearing from me, I welcome you to listen to the latest episode of the NoOffice podcast where I got to geek out with my friend Augusto Pinaud about the future of computing seen through the lens of Apple Vision Pro

Yours productively,

• Michael Sliwinski

CEO and founder of Nozbe

P.S. In the middle of all this I found some time to write about my experience of using AirTags - which can come in handy when traveling in cars, with luggage and… people. I hope you’ll find it useful before your Summer holiday! Cheers!

P.P.S. If I wasn’t sharing enough, I also just published how committed we are to keeping both Nozbe Personal and Nozbe indefinitely online or how Nozbe is your trusted system for life.