Hello dear people and readers!
Until recently, our scenario for monetizing our efforts in building and maintaining this application was created believing that we live in an honest world, truth be said.
So, our system was built based on the number of studios a client was operating (given that the client would actually report the correct number of studios that he/she was having).
(for those who are not aware of the previous pricing scheme, it was 125 EUR / studio / month, billed in 3 months installments. However, the price would have been discounted with 10% for 6 months installments, or 20% for 1 year installments. And even more, for secondary locations, additional 10%-20%/etc discounts would have been given as long as the total discount for a location would have not exceeded 40%.)
Till June 2021, after over 7 years of being with you guys, we never thought on changing anything. But the economy has changed a lot in the past years, and so should we.
A few things where brought to our attention by our clients, as following:
- there are start-up studios, with very few models, who could not afford 125 EUR/month – which is not what we want.
- and there are also some studios (many it seems) that didn’t reported back to us the correct number of studios they where operating – and, despite I’m not judgemental, it gives me a little frustration already, after so many years.
As a PERSONAL NOTE, I believe of myself that I’m a correct person and that I never intended to take advantage of someone (and during the years, many of you confirmed this to me), so believe me or not, it has been almost 3 months of struggling and thinking on how to reshape the pricing scheme so that nobody will suffer, but on the opposite direction – it will be fair for everyone, as right now it isn’t.
So, i have analyzed lots of other similar services and software applications around the web and investigated how they operate their business in relation with the pricing fees:
- Various support-offering apps for example have prices that range from 20$ to 6$ per user (or agent), while the bigger value is for less users, and the smallest value is for volume/corporate usage.
- Various SaaS software apps (for rentals, hotels, restaurants, etc), are using pricing techniques based on the client’s income (or number of orders/bookings). This means that the app charges for a fee out of the original purchase. But i could never do this (for example, i could never ask for x% out of each model’s earnings… it can be too much for many studios. JustCamIt app (that AdultWork camsite had), used to charge 5% of each transaction. Now imagine a studio with 10 models that earn every month over 10k dollars (or 20k)… how would be if I would charge 5% from those models (and all the others in that studio as well). I will tell you how: outrageous 🙂
- Various CMS apps for managing a business charge at least 15$ per user per month (on average).
Monday.com charges on average 10$/user/month, smartsheet.com charges 13 EUR/user/month, Asana.com 10.99 EUR/month, trello.com 10$/user/month, projectmanager.com starts from 15$/user/month, clubhouse.io charges 8.5$/user/month, teamogy.com starts from 19 eur/user/month, etc… Any software around the globe that allows for managing your team and your projects, on average, asks for at least 13-14 EUR per user & per month! And is NOT specifically tailored for adult videochat business!
Anyway… i will not talk here about all the research I’ve done.
The idea is that Camerolla app offers (literally) TONS of features, great features… some of which you guys use a lot, some that you don’t… but of course it’s up to each client to decide which features they use.
So I’ve came to the conclusion that Camerolla needs to be priced based on the number of recently-active users in the system, and if you’ll read this post till the end, you’ll see that I’ve been thinking about almost everything (I hope, anyway).
I’ve also been talking with few persons in the industry, with very successful studio owners, with various persons belonging to the teams of various camsites that you guys work with, and also with several industry marketing specialists. Some of them said I should change it to a “per model account” business, with a price not lower than 5 EUR/month, others mentioned a “per user account” (be it staff or model) and also at least 5EUR/month.
From my point of view (and as from my servers’ point of view), most times the app is used more by staff-users compared with the models (in means of server-load) so yes, we have decided to change pricing to a “per user account” approach, starting with January 2022, as you will see bellow.
Ok, so here’s how we’ve thought about it:
- 5.99 € per user per month if you’re a startup, with no more than 5 full-time users
- 4.99 € per user per month – if you operate between 6 and 35 full-time users per month
- 3.99 € per user per month – if you have between 36 and 99 users
- 2.99 € per user per month – if you operate 100 full-time users or more
But now, before you run into any conclusions, let us explain a bit what does this “full-time user” mean.
The idea is that in ANY given month, you might have:
- a stable user, that worked the entire month
- OR a user (model or staff) that at some point decided to leave (ex: on 17th of the month)
- OR a user that joined your team later in the month (ex: on 23rd)
Well, we’ve made the licensing system in such a beautiful way that it will calculate exactly if a user worked only a fraction of the month or the entire month, accordingly.
And to show this to you, take a look at the picture on your left (or if you’re on mobile, on top of this text, the one with yellow highlights), which details the pricing for models that joined late or leaved the job.
(Please note that we’ve highlighted a few areas… where the user either joined at a given time and the “cost” is low, either left early and the calculated cost is also low.)
The main idea is that we consider a month to have 31 days (despite that there are months having 30 or 28 or 29 days). This means that a full year will actually have about 11.8 months (and not 12).
So, if a user was only active for 7 days in a month (for example he/she quit on 7th of the month, or he/she joined on 23rd), the calculated cost for the user would NOT be 2.99 (or 3.99 or 4.99, depending on how many users you operate), but will be a fraction of it. The fraction is calculated by dividing the price (ex 2.99) to 31 days (to have the per-day value) and than multiply it with 7 days… so the calculated value is of almost 0.67 EUR (instead 2.99, etc).
I don’t know if what I’ve explained above was easy to understand or not, but here, bellow, i will try to give you a few examples of various data, so that you can better understand the costs
Start-up studio
Let’s imagine a true start-up studio, with the following:
- 1 owner account
- 1 or 2 trainer accounts
- 1 or 2 stable model accounts
- maybe 4-5 models that come and go
The monthly costs for such a studio would be:
- 18 EUR (or 24 or 30) EUR for the stable users (staff+models)
- and maybe an additional of 5 or so EUR for the come-and-go mode
After some math, a total of 30-32 EUR per month, give or take.
Average studio
A relatively small studio, would have something like:
- 1 owner account
- 2-3 trainer accounts
- 10+ stable model accounts
- also 5-7 models that come and go
The monthly costs for such a studio would be:
- ~70 EUR for the stable users (staff+models)
- and maybe an additional of 5 or so EUR for the come-and-go models
So after some math, an average cost of 75-80 EUR/month
A normal studio
A normal-to-big studio, would have something like this:
- 1 owner account
- 5+ trainer accounts
- 25+ stable model accounts
- manager / payments processor
- also around 10 models that come and go
The monthly costs for such a studio would be:
- ~135 EUR (33 x 3.99) for the stable users (staff+models)
- and maybe an additional of 10 or so EUR for the come-and-go models
So a “calculated” cost of about 150 EUR / month
Corporate studio
A big studio should look more like a corporation, so its expected growth/setup would be like this:
- 1 owner account
- 1 or 2 managers
- 1 payments processor
- 20+ trainer/admin accounts
- 80+ stable model accounts
- also around 20+ models that come and go
The monthly costs for such a studio would be:
- ~300 EUR (100 x 2.99) for the stable users (staff+models)
- and maybe an additional of 30-40 or so EUR for the come-and-go models
So a “calculated” cost of about ~350 EUR / month
