Why would I want to pay you $40/mo, if I'm paying $3/mo for shared hosting that I know can handle 250 users?
And its the same way through out. Even at the highest level, it'd be cheaper for me to lease a second dedicated server to spread the load, than it is to pay you for your service.
And I don't think this is something that should be a monthly service. I only want to check my load once in a while to see if its doing fine, so I think by asking so much money on a monthly basis, you are driving users away. I think you'll be better off doing it as one off results. i.e. the $499/mo option, should be a $29.99 one time fee for 3 reports
First - the people on $3 /mo shared hosting are not in the target market for this service. If you are on shared hosting, you don't need loadtesting.
Second - I think subscription is fine. As a subscription, I recognize that I -should be- load testing on a regular basis. As a-la-carte, I am much more likely to say "umpteen dollars?I can do my own loadtest for cheaper then that."
I'll second that. For personal use it may seem like a lot of money, but for the target groups that needs this kind of service it's cheap. It's not just about the cost of servers, it's much more the time spent doing it.
We have found that some people like using the service as an optimization/development tool. Starting a load test is painless enough that they can write some code, test it with our service, change some things, test again, etc. and sometimes get huge performance gains. Buying another server gives you a 2x performance increase, but it will cost you forever. Optimizing your code can give you 20x performance increase and only cost you while you're working on the optimizations.
But I guess it depends on how you use the service. For people who just want to verify performance occasionally, what you write makes sense, and we're going to create a one-time (or maybe "one-day") offer also that you can buy every time you need to run a test.
The "basic" level pricing is in-line with what I'd expect to pay for this service, but the other two levels are way beyond what I'd be willing to. I'd like the chance to run these larger tests, but I could never justify that kind of money (> a server) on load testing. It's a pretty big jump.
If the higher-end plan ends up being popular with a certain type of business (?), perhaps you could include a few "mega-tests" per month for the low plan. I would mind fewer 250 tests if it meant I could perform a couple of 500 or 1000 tests.
Thanks, that's good feedback. We are actually working right now to provide another option - initially we wanted to sell a "single test" but we realised people are likely to want to fiddle around with their configuration a bit, maybe start a couple of small tests to verify that the config is working. To make things simple we thought a 1-hour subscription would be good, but it might turn into a "day pass" instead. We'll see, we haven't decided yet. Anyway it will be an account you buy for a very limited period (without a running subscription), it will let you run larger tests than the BASIC subscription allows, and it will be a lot cheaper than the PRO or ADVANCED subscriptions. Basically, it will be intended for one-off tests.
Why would I want to pay you $40/mo, if I'm paying $3/mo for shared hosting that I know can handle 250 users?
And its the same way through out. Even at the highest level, it'd be cheaper for me to lease a second dedicated server to spread the load, than it is to pay you for your service.
And I don't think this is something that should be a monthly service. I only want to check my load once in a while to see if its doing fine, so I think by asking so much money on a monthly basis, you are driving users away. I think you'll be better off doing it as one off results. i.e. the $499/mo option, should be a $29.99 one time fee for 3 reports