Thank you to those who have shared their feedback! We take this feedback very seriously. Our #1 priority is ensuring we build solutions to meet your needs and enable you to go viral!
I thought it would be helpful to share the top 3 feedback topics we've heard from people and explain how we are addressing them.
Integration Libraries
Many customers are familiar with installing a library to the website in the programming language specific to their codebase (i.e. PHP, Ruby, .NET, Java). The Address Book API we offer is language agnostic and we exist to be as platform or language neutral as possible. However, we realize making such libraries available would ease the integration for many of these customers. We also recognize the user experience can be a bit "clunky" and our customers could use some help and guidance to properly handle contact importing.We are now pleased to offer the following integration libraries to plug in our Address Book API to your website.
- PHP - available for beta testing
- Ruby - available for beta testing
- .NET - in the works (evaluating feedback)
- Java - in the works (evaluating feedback)
We also have a Javascript mashup component library available for beta testing, which provides you with a blueprint to setup the recommended user experience for your customers.
We aim to have these in full production very soon, pending feedback from our beta testing. If you are interested in learning more or want to sign up to be a beta tester, please contact us.
Pricing
Many customers are familiar with paying a license fee for their contact importing library, plus an annual support subscription to receive updates. Although we continue to offer CloudSponge.com FREE to ALL customers, many have asked how we can build a sustainable business or keep up with offering at no charge. We recognize it is inevitable any business needs to charge something, at some point. However, before making a decision on our pricing, we took the time to evaluate feedback from our customers.Customer feedback indicated the pricing should also be affordable, within their budget for an existing provider, and be flexible based on their contact importing volume.
Our pricing model intends to incorporate the following assumptions:
- Minimum charge in the range of $25
- Pay-as-you-go, credits based price, where you pay for what you use with CloudSponge.com.
- 1 credit = 1 import = all the addresses within a contact source (i.e. all the email addresses within Yahoo).
- Per credit price should be somewhere in the range of $0.005 to $0.050
- The more you spend gives you more credits, resulting in a discounted per credit price.
We are pleased to announce we have an initial price list now available, taking all these things into consideration. Since CloudSponge.com is available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS), our pricing reflects the value you are receiving from an on-demand, SaaS service. Once we have validated our assumptions with a few key customers, we will publish this price list for everyone. We plan on beginning to start charging within 1-2 months time. We will keep you posted as we get closer to that date.
If you are interested in our price list, please contact us.
Additional Features, Contact Sources
We heard many great ideas and requests for additional features and contact sources. We are continuing to evaluate these ideas before committing to one over the other. Rather than list them all here, we plan to setup a feedback forum to share these ideas and new ones, plus let others vote and discuss the idea. We will let you know when this feedback forum is available.In the meantime, you can still send us your feedback on any features or contact sources you would be interested in.
It's exciting times here at CloudSponge.com! Stay tuned for more updates!