Feedback request regarding upcoming updates to AstroBin's subscriptions model - Forums

Topic starter

Admin

IOTD Staff

Exemplary contributor

May 30, 2023 · Edited: May 30, 2023

Hello,

I'm about to make some small changes to the AstroBin's subscriptions model and I would like to get some feedback from you people in the AstroBin Beta Testers group, just to make sure I'm not making any blunders.

The changes are very simple, and this is a bullet-list summary:

There are no price increases. Just like it is now, base prices are based on the following:

Lite 20 CHF
Premium 40 CHF
Ultimate 60 CHF
Prices are converted to the most popular currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, CAD, CNY) and:

Yearly prices are rounded up to the next 50 cents
Monthly prices (see below) are rounded up to the next 25 cents

I'm adding support for automatically renewing subscriptions, and:

If you have had an active subscription in the last two years, you may continue using non-automatically renewing subscriptions
If you are a new paying user, or you haven't been a paying user in over two years, you will only have the option to buy an automatically renewing subscription
In any case, automatically renewing subscriptions can be cancelled immediately after purchase, and the subscription on AstroBin will be active for the entire period (e.g. 1 year)

I'm adding support for monthly subscriptions:

Monthly subscriptions are about 20% more expensive than yearly
Monthly subscription cannot be non-automatically renewing
If you image seasonally (e.g. only 6 months a year because of your latitude) you can cancel your subscription for the months you don't need it and subscribe again when you need it again, and everything will still be there

I'm adding support for country-specific prices, and I've split it in three tiers:

Tier 1 (first-world countries, such as USA, Western Europe, etc, you know what I mean): full price (again, same price as before, no increase)
Tier 2 (countries with not so great economy, e.g. Italy, Greece, Brazil, Argentina, India, Portugal, etc): 25% off
Tier 3 (poor and developing countries, e.g. most african countries, Haiti, Pakistan, Bangladesh...): 50% off

As always, everybody who emails me because a subscription was charged but they forgot to cancel, I always refund with no questions asked

Why am I making these changes:

Many of you have requested automatically renewing subscriptions, and this can potentially bring a bit more revenue by removing gaps between subscriptions. I want to bring more and more awesome features to AstroBin that I have in my TODO list, and I'm hoping to hire a software engineer next year to help me. If this increases the revenue by 10%, it's significant.
Many of you who image seasonally have asked for monthly subscriptions. I want to give you this option.
Many of you in countries with poorer economy have asked for a lower price. I'm hoping this will make more people who are on the fence subscribe to AstroBin.
If in the future I will want to restructure the subscription plans or increase the prices, it will be easier if people are subscribed with a recurring subscription, because they will continue to pay the same price for the same features they signed up for.

This is the gist of it and I'm not far from finishing. If you have any feedback, please let me know!

I'm doing this in the least disruptive way possible so that nothing changes for you if you don't want (i.e. you can continue buying the yearly non-automatically renewing subscriptions), or, if you are in a country that is not in Tier 1, AstroBin will actually become cheaper for you.

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

Helpful

Steeve Body

IOTD Staff

May 30, 2023

Great stuff @Salvatore Iovene

One suggestion I would like to make is potentially having a student discount? There are a lot more younger folks getting into the hobby and this type of discount is a common occurrence with other services usually in the range of 25 to 50% discount

Just food for thoughts.

Steeve

Ivaylo Stoynov

May 30, 2023

Hi Salvatore,

The changes look good to me and will allow more fellows to have access to the AstroBin services. Some friends here in Bulgaria stopped using it only because of the price…

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Andre Vilhena

May 30, 2023

Hi,

Those changes seem great to me, as it adds a lot of flexibility. The country specific price tiers are a great idea (albeit it saddens me not to have Portugal on Tier 1 but can't argue against it…) but I'd suggest you to have clear criteria to classify countries - otherwise there may be some fuss about why some country in a given tier and not in another.

Cheers,
André

Jeffbax Velocicaptor

IOTD Staff

May 30, 2023

Hi Salvatore. All sounds very good 👍

JF

Salvatore Iovene

Topic starter

Admin

IOTD Staff

Exemplary contributor

May 30, 2023

Steeve Body:
One suggestion I would like to make is potentially having a student discount? There are a lot more younger folks getting into the hobby and this type of discount is a common occurrence with other services usually in the range of 25 to 50% discount

Thanks, this can be done a bit more formally in the future for sure! Right now, one just needs to ask, as I do have a "discount coupon" mechanism already.

Ivaylo Stoynov:
The changes look good to me and will allow more fellows to have access to the AstroBin services. Some friends here in Bulgaria stopped using it only because of the price...

Hopefully this brings them back! On a related note: if you buy a telescope or a camera in Bulgaria, is it cheaper than in richer countries? Do hardware vendors also adapt their price to the market?

Andre Vilhena:
he country specific price tiers are a great idea (albeit it saddens me not to have Portugal on Tier 1 but can't argue against it...) but I'd suggest you to have clear criteria to classify countries - otherwise there may be some fuss about why some country in a given tier and not in another.

Yes, I'm going to use some published world economy index or something.

Maybe this:
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.jsp

Does anybody have a better suggestion?

Kevin Dixon

IOTD Staff

May 30, 2023

Good Morning Salvatore,

I think the proposed changes are nice enhancement to the subscription process.

Clear skies,
Kevin

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Gary Imm

May 30, 2023

The proposed changes look fine to me, Salvatore. Also, I like the idea of a student discount but I understand the difficulty of verification.

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Ivaylo Stoynov

May 30, 2023 · Edited: May 30, 2023

Salvatore Iovene:
Ivaylo Stoynov:
The changes look good to me and will allow more fellows to have access to the AstroBin services. Some friends here in Bulgaria stopped using it only because of the price...

Hopefully this brings them back! On a related note: if you buy a telescope or a camera in Bulgaria, is it cheaper than in richer countries? Do hardware vendors also adapt their price to the market?

There is no market adaptation. We are small market with few resellers, The majority are using on-line stores in Germany, Austria, UK as well as second hand equipment... However, the average salary is lower than the Mid/West Europe which makes the hobby more expensive for many.

Salvatore Iovene

Topic starter

Admin

IOTD Staff

Exemplary contributor

May 30, 2023

Finding the best country tier split is proving to be very difficult.

I suppose this page would offer the best list countries sorted by purchasing power:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

Please sort by the CIA estimate, which is the only column to have values for all countries.

Where would you draw the line between tier 1 and tier 2, and then tier 2 and tier 3?

Dale Penkala

May 30, 2023

All looks good to me Salvatore! Keep up the great work!

Dale

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Gabriel R. Santos (grsotnas)

May 30, 2023

Hello Salvatore, I think all your suggestions to new subscriptions are great.

I agree that drawing the line between countries is not an easy task.

Maybe this could use the %discount as a proxy. In other words:
Tier 1 are the top 25% of #countries ordered by per-capita income [because the discount for Tier 2 is 25%].
Tier 2 are the countries between 25% and 50% [because the next discount is 50%]
Tier 3 are countries with income below 50%.

Using the wikipedia table you linked, that means that 48 countries would qualify as Tier 1, 48 as Tier 2, and 96 as Tier 3.

As another option, I'd say ideally this would be linked to per capita GDP, and not the country count. This would somewhat equalize the percentual cost of the subscription to the average income of the country, i.e. if the premium subscription costs ~0.1% of the yearly per-capita GDP for a first-world country (~60,000 CHF), it would be somewhat similar to a second or third world country, percentually. But the disparity is so great that only very few countries would qualify as Tier 1.

Man, that is a difficult problem!

I think the student discount is awesome. When I joined Astrobin (2013) I wasn't even in high school yet (2014-2016), but there was no subscription.
Perhaps a simple field/button in the subscription form would suffice for a student to upload a document (e.g. student card, enrollment proof), which is then reviewed and approved, leading to a personal discount code. The enrollment proof should be renewed by the user every year (or 2).

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Arny

May 30, 2023

very thoughtful - sound reasonable and fair to me, even though I would not benefit from any of the "reductions"

Arny

Bob Rucker

May 30, 2023

Salvatore, I think the proposed changes look good. The subscription cost model based on country tiers is a good idea (even with he implementation challenges). Finding ways to make astrophotography more accessible can only be a good thing. I was helping advise an aspiring astronomer in Cambodia and equipment costs for him are off the charts. Shipping costs and local duties really make this hobby difficult for people in many parts of the world.

Bob

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Linwood Ferguson

May 30, 2023

I will offer a slight contrarian view: I do not think REQUIRING auto-renewing annual subscriptions is a good thing, even if it is immediately cancelable. Monthly I understand.

It is quite simple to have a check box (which could even default to auto-renew) during the signup process. When companies (and most do this) require auto-renewing subscriptions, I always think a bit less of them, like they either are hoping I will forget to cancel, or not giving me credit for being smart enough to decide.

Your rules (immediate cancel, always refunding if someone forgets) are more than fair, I do not suggest this is any sort of inappropriate pressure or scam. I do suggest that just offering people the choice instead of forcing it on them is more customer friendly. Defaulting to auto-renew achieves the same goal if the goal is customer convenience.

—-

I also think the whole country specific pricing thing is a tough sell to ever get people to think it is fair, no matter what you do. in the US there are a lot (maybe the majority) of people doing astrophotography on extreme budgets. There are also people with gear that costs as much as a small house, and you can find those in poor countries as well as rich. One might even argue the people with larger budgets (regardless of country) are more represented on astrobin. Whatever you do, someone will feel excluded, someone will feel cheated, and someone will snicker they just saved 25% despite having a 1m scope in a nice dome.

Maybe go to the honor system, and ask people to pay 0.5% of their gear value with a cap annually. Note I'm not sure if I offer that suggestion for real or a joke, this is not a simple problem.

But I do think there is something a bit wrong about presuming that being in a more poor country means astrophotographers there are poor, or that being in a rich country means your average astrophotographer there is rich.

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Linwood Ferguson

May 30, 2023

Oh… one other thing for auto-renew – be sure to have something that (separately) warns a user when their credit card is going to expire before renewal. I find I never quite remember all the places to change when my card renews, and miss a few. It's nice to fix ahead of time rather than after it fails.

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Salvatore Iovene

Topic starter

Admin

IOTD Staff

Exemplary contributor

May 30, 2023

Hi @Linwood Ferguson, thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it. I want to make a few of points.

The unethical thing to do would be to not send emails about upcoming renewals (AstroBin sends it 30 days and 7 days before the yearly payment, and will send it 7 days before the monthly payment).
This is, of course, in part, to remove friction from payments. On one hand, many people have requested it, sure, but on the other, there is certainly a business reason behind this, as you gathered (and AstroBin is, after all, a business). I'm not trying to do anything unethical, and I didn't run any numbers, but I'm sure that there is some loss of revenue due to the following factors:

People with expired subscriptions who come to AstroBin, see their subscription is expired, and think "meh, well maybe next time"
People with half a mind to cancel, but procrastinate it
People who happen to have gaps in their subscription because they have bad weather or are busy for a couple of months coincidentally right after their subscription is expired

I just checked the services that I use and that have online subscriptions. I have around 10 for personal use, and around 10 for professional use, and none of them support non-recurring subscriptions. The only ones are the those that don't have a fixed price, but you pay according to how much you use.

In any case, you and all others who have had a paid subscription in the past two years will have the checkbox that you mention, and it will go away only if you take a 2 year break from AstroBin.

Linwood Ferguson:
I also think the whole country specific pricing thing is a tough sell to ever get people to think it is fair, no matter what you do. in the US there are a lot (maybe the majority) of people doing astrophotography on extreme budgets. There are also people with gear that costs as much as a small house, and you can find those in poor countries as well as rich. One might even argue the people with larger budgets (regardless of country) are more represented on astrobin. Whatever you do, someone will feel excluded, someone will feel cheated, and someone will snicker they just saved 25% despite having a 1m scope in a nice dome.

Country specific prices are a very common thing for online services offered worldwide. It is likely, as you say, that the average AstroBin users is richer than the average person in their country, but that doesn't change the fact that, on average, people in that country might have a lower purchasing power. I'd find it hard to sympathize with somebody from the Principality of Monaco who complained that somebody from Mozambique was paying less than them from AstroBin

I'm sure that this idea makes more sense for consumer services with a target audience of "everyone", such as Netflix, Spotify, etc, and most likely the range of difference in purchasing power is less amongst astrophotographers in different countries, than it is amongst the average person (statistically speaking). I don't see anything wrong in adapting AstroBin's prices to varying economies. By the way, Netflix is $20 in Switzerland, but $3 in Pakistan. I won't be writing any letters to Netflix about it

Linwood Ferguson:
But I do think there is something a bit wrong about presuming that being in a more poor country means astrophotographers there are poor, or that being in a rich country means your average astrophotographer there is rich.

I haven't run a census, I don't think that would be possible. This sounds like a fair assumption to me, to be honest. I find the opposite assumption (all astrophotographers worldwide have the same disposable income) to be very unlikely. Of course this is just an oversimplification.

Linwood Ferguson:
Oh... one other thing for auto-renew -- be sure to have something that (separately) warns a user when their credit card is going to expire before renewal. I find I never quite remember all the places to change when my card renews, and miss a few. It's nice to fix ahead of time rather than after it fails.

Yup, thanks for the suggestion, this is already handled by AstroBin's payment processor: https://stripe.com/

In any case, should your credit card expire, and you ignore the reminder, and your AstroBin subscription fails to renew, that's still okay and nothing happens to your images or any of your content. Your account would be downgraded to Free and you would realize it the next time you tried to upload an image or used one of the advanced search features!

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Linwood Ferguson

May 30, 2023

I never indicated I thought it was unethical to force auto-renewal, In fact I said specifically "your rules… more than fair". Your conscience should be clean in either case, and I never meant to indicate otherwise.

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Salvatore Iovene

Topic starter

Admin

IOTD Staff

Exemplary contributor

May 30, 2023

Linwood Ferguson:
I never indicated I thought it was unethical to force auto-renewal, In fact I said specifically "your rules... more than fair". Your conscience should be clean in either case, and I never meant to indicate otherwise.

Yeah I know, I was writing “for argument’s sake” and for preemptive transparency

Steeve Body

IOTD Staff

May 30, 2023 · Edited: May 30, 2023

I think Linwood brought a few interesting points that are worth expending on.

The overarching sentiment I'm getting from what Salvatore is trying to do is "inclusion and accessibility" which I think is awesome.

So in that spirit here are a few suggestions addressing some of the concerns Linwood raised:

1) Presuming that being in a more poor country means astrophotographers there are poor

Maybe Salvatore could implement a simple check box "I can afford full price and support Astrobin" so this leave it to the users to decide what they want to do. Most people given the choice tend to make the right decision... and with point 4 I am making bellow this could be even more of an incentive, maybe the entire price difference can go to that...?

2) Living in a rich country does not mean you are rich

Matter of fact a lot of people living in the US are living under the poverty line or working several jobs just to get by... there are also a lot of folks loosing their jobs or working freelance and having to go months sometime without any work. Sure a lot of first world countries member here are doing ok but that does not mean everyone is. Maybe again there could be a checkbox for this but that would create an admin burden and a case by case review....

3) Students and Pensioners

I'm sure the student discount is going to be easy to implement and Salvatore seems to be keen on doing that... so maybe lets extend that to pensioners, also another part of the community which can seriously struggle with revenue

4) Sponsorship and outreach

Would that be awesome if as a community we could decide to donate a small portion of our subscription to give to someone less fortunate passionate about the night sky the chance to dive deeper into the hobby? Or At least have an option to make a donation for such a cause and choose and amount we can afford?

The idea would be to set up a fund which would seek suitable candidates and set them up with a small portable setup (redcat + startracker + OSC or something like that) and an Astrobin subscription. We could get manufacture like ZWO and Skywatcher to help out, folks could submit their stories for consideration and potentially a few times a year we could make someone really happy? That is a whole over discussion of course but I for sure would love to see that and read these stories.

Steeve

Bogdan Borz

May 31, 2023

Hi Salvatore,

Sounds ok, especially the reduction for fellow astronomers, I hope it will be enough because there are cases of excellent photographers that are no longer posting due to price problems.

A different aspect would be to allow people to change their long term automatic renewal for another formula easily. Sites that renew automatically are usually pretty annoying when they are oriented towards their own interests. Good reminders and possibility to opt out or downgrade should be the norm, if people want to continue they will anyway. So an email with "renew" "change formula" "don't renew" links for example, would be nice.

All best,

Bogdan

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Peter Goodhew

May 31, 2023

I'm happy with Salvatore's proposal

Ivaylo Stoynov

May 31, 2023 · Edited: May 31, 2023

I like the idea about "I can afford full price and support Astrobin" which to overwrite the suggested pricing model!

It is hard to create models that work equally well for everyone ( unless you use the tax declaration

) No matter how good it is, there will be people that will think that they are discriminated.

What about a "super lite" plan which has something like 20 images per year but with reduced image size up to 700KB (or dimensions limitation)? If you are beginner, student, pensioner or you have a very limited budget the setup should be limited… The produced results most likely will be with limited resolution…

If you get 10" scope with 20MB CMOS and producing high resolution images with 20h integration time (means a good mount) you should already be able to pay the regular plan price no matter where you live.

Salvatore Iovene

Topic starter

Admin

IOTD Staff

Exemplary contributor

May 31, 2023

Hi guys,

thank you all for the brainstorming, feedback, and ideas! It's really good to have people like you to help out, since I work alone

However, let's not overcomplicate things. A "pay what you want" model has a few problems:

If given the choice to pay less, most people would. Yes, I know that many of you would pay more because you know me and know that AstroBin is run but me alone and that I keep improving the platform. However, many people don't know this and I'm sure some think of AstroBin as a faceless corporation with people working in an office and making millions every year
AstroBin makes enough money as is, to be honest. I make more money than the average software engineer in Switzerland for sure, and by extension this probably means I make more money than the median AstroBin user, and I don't want people to think that they need to pay more of their hard-earned money for me. It doesn't sound fair. I now realize that I have a "donate" button at the top-right of the website, but I will remove it.
AstroBin subscriptions system is already extremely complicated (form the point of view of the source code), because I made the choice long time ago to allow people to be grandfathered in their subscriptions (this means that if you bought a subscription at some point in the past, you should be allowed to continue using the features that you subscribed for indefinitely). This is probably more than most companies do, but it sounds ethical to me. However, this means that AstroBin supports:

different sets of features:

Customers who both the original Lite and Premium between 2016 and 2019
Customers who both the revised Lite and Premium, or Ultimate, in 2020 or later

and payment processing stacks for:

Recurring PayPal payments (first payment method available on AstroBin when it became a paid platform in 2016)
Non-recurring PayPal payments (introduced in 2018)
Non-recurring Stripe payments

All this works because I have hundreds of unit tests testing all combinations, to avoid breaking things. I definitely don't want to complicate this any more, and adding a "choose what you pay" model would mean adding a whole new set of subscription classes in the source code.

Finally, in the spirit of keeping things simple, let's not get ahead of ourselves with checking tax declarations or percentage of the cost of one's equipment (I know they weren't real suggestions btw

).

I know that somebody from Switzerland can be poorer that somebody from Bangladesh, but that's not the point. The point is improving things on average, the for majority of people.

Regarding students and senior discounts, it becomes a problem of verification. I'm pretty sure you can generate a fake school certificate online in a couple of clicks, so I'll need to think about this.

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Valter Reis | Observatório Astronómico dos Reis-OAR

May 31, 2023

Hello!
I´ve read all the comments and they are all constructive. Any decision will be good for some and criticized by others. The final decision, obviously is from @Salvatore Iovene and as long as he can make it transparent and clear to everyone, i thin it will be ok. Creating this topic was an excelent way to show that Astrobin cares for the users.

I also have a suggestion, that is along with the students discount, astronomy groups or school groups, should be considered too in having a cheaper access.
Just my cents.

Valter

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