Announcing (new) pricing for the Personal Plan

Ever since launching my first SaaS I have added a free, limited plan to give new users a taste of what the product can do. This often worked great! But this can only be sustainable if the free plan is covered by the paid plans.

Since launch, free plan usage has been growing exponentially. Way outgrowing the paid plans. And that’s when, as a bootstrapped business, you need to take a step back and rethink a few things.

The Team Plan plan subscribers are growing at a very nice, comfortable pace too. So this is mostly a change made while still being comfortable, opposed doing while it might be (almost) too late.

The Personal plan isn’t going anywhere. I’ve got many messages from you saying how delightful you find updating your personal site with Spinal. That’s the focus of the plan: it’s not meant for (SaaS) companies, but for your personal blog. It will be slightly tweaked though. Let’s go over the details.

New pricing for Personal plan #

• the content types limit will be increased to two (from one)
• member limit will stay one (no change)
• content limit of 200 (between your content types; new)
• a one-time payment of just $49 (no subscription)

Without the Personal plan, you can set up Spinal like before: connect GitHub, set up your first content type, create or edit content. But publishing content is disabled. Also the content limit will be 25 items.

Free still for OSS and non-profits #

As before, if you maintain an open-source project, or run a non-profit, that uses any of the supported static site generators, you can get the Team Plan for free. Reach out to support for all the details.

A free 5-day trial for the Content Marketing Team plan #

Semi-related to these changes, also coming 22 January, is the 5-day free trial for the Team Plan. As more and more features are introduced to this plan, it no longer has feature parity with the Personal Plan. So a free, with credit card added, trial starts to make sense. It will allow teams give Spinal a solid try with all the marvelous features the Team Plan has.

Some questions you might have, answered:

When does this new pricing go into effect? #

This new plan/pricing will go into effect on 22 January 2023.

Will this apply to current Personal plan users? #

No, not until 31 December 2023. All users who are using the Personal plan before 22 January, can use the current Personal plan features for free until the end of 2023.

Why not a subscription? #

The Personal plan is as it says: for personal use. Paying for a subscription is a big step. A one-time payment is way smaller commitment. The total amount wouldn’t be much, compared to the Team Plan revenue, based on my (pessimistic) projections, but should be enough to recoup some of the costs and thus keep it around.

Will the Personal plan go away? #

Not right now. But I can’t predict the future. Just as with this announcement, any other change will be announced in advance.

Published: 11 January 2023 (updated: 9 February 2023)