Future Pricing Plans
As we recently posted , our roadmap for the remainder of the Jungle Disk beta is now in place, and we expect the official non-beta release of the software will occur in 2-3 months. We’re now ready to announce the planned pricing for the release version of the software as well. We’ve considered the best pricing model for a long time now and listened closely to feedback from our great beta testers. In the end, we decided to give you two options to choose from, both incredibly simple and cheap:
The release version of the Jungle Disk software will cost:
- $20 for a lifetime purchase with free upgrades
OR - $1 per month subscription with no up-front cost (and of course free upgrades)
That’s it - we’re not charging anything additional based on the amount you store. You pay the same $0.15 per gigabyte directly to Amazon.
With either the purchase or subscription version you can install and use the software on as many computers as you want using the same S3 Account. No need to buy each platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) separately - you get all three for one price.
We’ll also be offering a free trial period for both new users and existing beta testers who are still deciding if Jungle Disk and S3 are right for them.
Please note that this pricing only applies to the release version of the software. The beta version will remain free to use for the remainder of the beta period, and beta versions will continue to function for at least 30 days after the release version is available.
And as always there are no ads, no bundles, and no spyware. Software as we think it should be.
We really think this pricing model will accommodate all users, and we’re eager to get your feedback.
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Mark M said,
February 2, 2007 @ 1:15 pm
You might want to consider making backup restores free, but running the backup and pushing files up to S3 require the licensed version (the subscription).
Jungle Dave said,
February 2, 2007 @ 1:41 pm
Not quite sure how that would work - what you would be able to restore for free if you had to pay to back up in the first place?
Of course, the opposite would be possible - free to back up, pay to restore.. but that just seems cruel
Ianiv S said,
February 2, 2007 @ 5:14 pm
I think what Mark means (and please correct me if I’m wrong) is that if beta versions expire after 30 days of the release version, and you already have a backup on S3 and you decide not to pay, that backup is now useless. So it would be nice if you gave those users, who’ve already paid the S3 fees for their backups, the chance to restore their files.
The same applies to people who pay the monthly fee and then decide to stop for some reason.
In some cases, pay to backup + pay to restore is just as cruel as free to backup + pay to restore.
Jungle Dave said,
February 2, 2007 @ 6:02 pm
Ah, that makes more sense. We’ll provide a free command-line tool (based on our GPL’d source) that can be used to retrieve your files if your trial expires and you decide not to purchase Jungle Disk (but still want to get your files back).
Mat C said,
February 3, 2007 @ 11:25 am
This is all great news.
Can I invest in Jungle Disk ?
Jungle Dave said,
February 3, 2007 @ 11:48 am
We’re not seeking any outside investment yet - and the use of Amazon means our capital costs are very low. But thanks for asking!
MattyT said,
February 4, 2007 @ 3:53 pm
I think the pricing model is *very* fair. Especially like the fact that you’re charging per account, not computer - as it should be!
Thanks guys,
Matt
tecosystems » links for 2007-02-05 said,
February 4, 2007 @ 10:26 pm
[…] Jungle Disk » Blog Archive » Future Pricing Plans i’m with Alex - this seems eminently reasonable (tags: JungleDisk pricing S3 Amazon via:Alex) […]
MathewL said,
February 5, 2007 @ 4:16 pm
Um… $20 flat fee for as many systems as you like forever seems awfully low. I’m actually concerned that you won’t make enough money to stay in business… which would be bad as I love Jungle Disk.
Jungle Dave said,
February 5, 2007 @ 8:29 pm
You’re welcome to send more if you’d like
Frankly we think we’d go out of business a lot quicker if we priced the software too high, or put onerous terms on users like per-machine licenses. I have 6 computers at my house. If the software was $30 per machine, _I_ wouldn’t even buy it! We also think the great pricing that Amazon offers puts a lot of pressure on software providers to make their offerings reasonable as well. After all, who would want to pay 10X more for the software to use a service than for the service itself?
Darek Rusin said,
February 8, 2007 @ 2:12 am
Dave,
That is just perfect. Very fair, very reasonable plan.
Tom said,
February 10, 2007 @ 12:37 pm
Please set up something so people can pay as soon as possible, this will help fund your continuing work, $20.00 is a fantastic price. Thanks, Tom
Ross said,
February 10, 2007 @ 11:00 pm
Dave,
I’m a big fan but I’m going to be the first and probably only one to say that a lifetime purchase shouldn’t be an option. You need to let people purchase the software and then give them one year of updates rather then a life time of updates so you have continued revenue for development.
Ross
- http://www.thehostguru.com
Doug said,
February 13, 2007 @ 9:09 am
I am definitely with Ross on this! I want to see JungleDisk survive and continue for years. For this you will need a continuing income. I would have thought that $1/month and $10/year would keep everyone happy and provide you with a continual income.
I *REALLY* appreciate a per-user license as you are proposing rather than a per-machine license. I run four computers and would not buy JungleDisk if it meant having to buy four licenses!
You are offering a great deal - but perhaps it’s a bit too great.
Jungle Dave said,
February 13, 2007 @ 9:17 am
I really appreciate the support, and the belief that the software is good enough to keep paying for over time.
However, as a small company our best bet for long term growth is to reach a larger audience, not to try and milk our existing customers for every penny we can.
It will be a long time before we come even close to saturating the market, and in the meantime our best marketing tool is our customers - they more happy they are with us (and our pricing) the more folks they’ll tell about us and the more customers we’ll get.
chrassig said,
February 13, 2007 @ 10:02 am
Regarding the concerns mentioned here that Jungle Disk might go out of business:
I recently extended an open source Java tool (it is called jSh3ll) to support the way Jungle Disk stores files at Amazon S3. So far it is only a command line tool, but I consider to write an open source tool with a GUI that is compatible to Jungle Disk (if noone objects, I would call it Glade Disk). As my tool already is open source and even I could not change that fact, you will be able to use it as long as Amazon S3 exists and you have computer which is able to run Java (Windows, MacOS, Linux etc. are all fine).
I would like to underline that even though Jungle Disk uses encryption, the way the encryption is used is described very well and Jungle Dave was very helpful to me during the development of the extension to jSh3ll.
The bottom line is: Even now, without any further development by myself or any further support by the Jungle Disk team, you are able to restore the files you stored to Amazon for free with my tool.
Dan said,
February 16, 2007 @ 9:52 pm
I think the $20 is a good price point for this type of application. It’s much like one of my favorite apps, VisualHub, being that its a very useful mini-app for dealing with your existing stuff, pushing it around, recoding, file management kind of stuff. Its not really a hefty program that required 200 coders 5 years to write so should be priced accordingly. Don’t get me wrong, JD is awesome and I like many people would be lost without clever, useful, and tidy apps like this.
I haven’t really got my head around the lifetime upgrades, because I’ve NEVER encountered it before, but good on JD for pushing this agenda intentionally or not. If I buy something I own it, not for one year, but forever! Do I expect upgrades forever? No, but as you’re offering, THANKS!
Big-ups to the Jungle Disk crew for a cool, clean and useful app. I’m spreading the word and I wish you all the best in the future!
Adam said,
February 19, 2007 @ 2:44 am
I think it’s both amusing and also a flattering testament to your software and support that the majority of us are saying “charge more!”
So, chiming in with the trend, here are my thoughts:
- Offer $20/lifetime only for your “charter” members… the ones who sign up in 2007 or signed up earlier. Especially as December approaches, that may light a fire under some folks’ posterior and give you a nice infusion of cash :).
- Charge $1/month or $10/year thereafter.
Jungle Dave said,
February 19, 2007 @ 8:10 am
Well, we’ve never said we wouldn’t raise prices (for new users) in the future - so you can consider this “introductory pricing” if you’d like - but the bottom line is that if the software is extremely popular at this price point we won’t have any reason to change it. If it’s not popular, raising the price probably won’t help that much.
James said,
February 20, 2007 @ 7:40 am
Wow, that’s good value. I was a little worried about starting to use Jungle Disk in case the price of the final release was prohibitive, but that’s a good deal.
Like others say, make sure you keep the revenue stream coming in. Once you reach critical mass, the “free updates for life” pricing might seem too generous.
Chris said,
February 22, 2007 @ 4:57 pm
I think this is a very fair price. I am looking forward to upgrading to the latest release (even though I haven’t had any problems with the beta) and purchasing the product.
Vladimir said,
February 25, 2007 @ 11:24 am
JungleDave says:
> If it’s not popular, raising the price probably won’t help
> that much.
Not always true. Price is one indication of value, so a low price might lead one to believe the product of low value.
Chris said,
February 27, 2007 @ 1:23 pm
For my purposes, $20 is a perfect price. My bill from Amazon right now is only $.05/month, so much more than a one time fee and you’d have lost me and likely many others who don’t have a ton of stuff to backup, but a small bit of critical data.
I will gladly pay the $20 though as this is such a perfect solution for me and my family.
Thanks!
Jackal said,
February 27, 2007 @ 10:08 pm
I’m 100% behind Dave’s proposed pricing–it sounds completely fair to me. And I don’t agree with Vladimir–because it uses Amazon’s infrastructure and there are additional charges from Amazon, I don’t think JD is in danger of being perceived as low value. (Now if the $20 per life included the storage space, yes, I’d be concerned that JD would fold and I’d lose my data–but I’m also paying Amazon and I have faith that they won’t go under.)
I’m actually more concerned with potential charges from my ISP if I decide to back up all of my internal and external hard drives on both of my computers–a tech told me there is a semi-official upload soft-cap of 7GB–not good for what amounts to 600-700GB.
For now, when I go to upload bigger files, I go over to my university and upload on their OC3 (although they seem to have a packet shaper that limits me to about 5mbps, since I can get more than that when using a download accelerator that transfers in multiple segments). Hopefully IT Services doesn’t catch on to me by my MAC address or anything! (Even if they do, I don’t think they could track it down to me, unless they did some packet sniffing and found some unencrypted information that identifies me, as it’s an open wireless system…I wonder if over-the-Internet backups on S3 will be the driving factor that makes residential users start pressuring their ISPs to offer better upload capacity.)
Jason said,
February 28, 2007 @ 7:19 am
I think the cost of this facility is fantastic value for money.
Now, I just need you to offer a payment method that does not require a credit card (such as Paypal
Jungle Dave said,
February 28, 2007 @ 9:53 am
We’re not ready to announce details yet, but there will be a non-CC payment option available.
Ben Watson said,
March 5, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
To echo the previous comments I think $1/month or $10/yr is perfectly reasonable and that $20 for a lifetime is too good of a deal.
Likewise I would encourage you to get the subscription payment pages up asap so that we can start paying you right now (maybe offer charter member / intro pricing of $10 for two years instead of one year).
Ben Watson, VP of Collaboration - Thomson NETg
Dave said,
March 5, 2007 @ 9:11 pm
I think both plans are very reasonable. One thing I would really like to see is an EC2 image with jungledisk preinstalled. That would make it really easy to backup in certain situations (eg. with linux-linux rsync) in a way that would minimize xfer traffic.
Someone said,
March 7, 2007 @ 1:34 pm
Jungle Disk might be even $50, I will pay for it. The only thing that stops me doing that is that I cannot use it as command line tool.
So I will search more…
Randy said,
March 12, 2007 @ 10:16 am
Any plans beyond simple backup of data?
Jungle Dave said,
March 12, 2007 @ 10:19 am
We’ve got lots of great plans - but Jungle Disk already goes far beyond a simple backup tool because it’s a completely open, unlimited size, “virtual drive” that you can do anything you want with.
Is there something specific you’re looking for?
FriscoSoul said,
March 13, 2007 @ 1:33 pm
I also think JungleDave’s got it about right for pricing. Let’s face it, once the news spreads that Amazon is offering such a great deal on storage, the customers are gonna come running. And a plethora of front-ends for the S3 service are going to emerge. Many current players in the online-storage market will go under.
JungleDisk has a head start is this game and will likely make a good amount of money — at the proposed price points — as the market quickly grows. The business mission will simply be to remain the finest front end available.
As it is, there are already some alpha-version front-ends out there. In fact, I’m currently using a couple of them to upload a snapshot of my system in a non-proprietary file format. But, what I really want is something along the lines of Mozy that will automate my backups, so I can set it and forget it. And, for me at least, that’s where JungleDisk comes in.
In the longer-run, making a good amount of money by front-ending S3 will likely be very tough. But, that’s at least a few years out, and, by then, I’m sure JungleDave and his crew will have some other great development projects in mind.
Ray said,
March 17, 2007 @ 5:55 pm
I, too, was worried about the possible pricing after beta. But, this is great news and very reasonable, especially with unlimited upgrades.
Personally, I don’t like having to keep track of yearly subscription things, so I’d rather not do $10/year. However, I would probably pay for major version upgrades every 5 years or so if the price stayed relatively the same.
Thanks for the peace of mind.
Cory said,
March 22, 2007 @ 11:26 am
My $20 check is all made out, that’s all I have to say.
William Carroll said,
March 26, 2007 @ 1:10 pm
I’m ready to give you my $20.
Elham Abawi said,
March 27, 2007 @ 5:15 pm
Do you have any affiliate\partner programs, I think the product is great and would love to resell and target Australian customers? Could we work something out?
Patrick said,
March 30, 2007 @ 4:44 pm
$20 per account for all 3 versions is better than reasonable, it’s a no-brainer. I think I just figured out a reasonably-priced way to both backup and share my personal music collection between my work (Win) and home (Linux) boxes!
Kevin said,
April 1, 2007 @ 5:32 pm
Where do I send my money? With the combination of Jungle Disk and S3 I’ll always have my important files backed up and available for a reasonable price. Thanks for making S3 so easy to use!
John said,
April 5, 2007 @ 9:02 am
$20 is cheap. Sign me up…
RaymonWazerri said,
April 20, 2007 @ 2:14 pm
Hey,
I love what you’e doing!
Don’t ever change and best of luck.
Raymon W.
Robbie Bow said,
April 22, 2007 @ 10:22 am
Just a quick word: sometimes low prices lose you a sale. People are sometimes prepared to pay more because they think price relates to quality. Similar small, handy single-issue applications tend to be priced at about US$20 - US$30 one-off fee, and I think you should be considering a price in that range. Maybe $20 would be reasonable.
Alex said,
April 24, 2007 @ 10:27 am
You have my $20! I’m making great use of JD at home on my development machine. Commit to svn, hotcopy repo to JD. Feels good knowing my work is safe.
Now all we need is a linux cli version for the production machines!
Danny said,
May 5, 2007 @ 12:25 pm
$20 is fair. A non CC method of payment (such as Google Checkout or Paypal) would be excellent.
Yahzi said,
May 6, 2007 @ 3:08 pm
I just saw the Amazon S3 stuff, and I thought, “Wow! Somebody should write an app for that!”
And here it is.
Ok, I am now looking at a picture of Allyson Hannigan, and thinking, “Wow! Somebody should write an app that strips off all those unnecessary clothes…”
Waiting… waiting… come on, guys…
Seriously, great plan. I’m gonna download the beta. I hope it lives up to the hype (read: is mind-numbingly simple to install and use), and I hope you guys clean up. I guess I don’t understand why Amazon didn’t write this app themselves and just give it away for free, to draw in customers.
Ryan said,
June 20, 2007 @ 12:01 am
I’ll happily pay $20. JungleDisk is the sort of thing I’d expect to be completely flaky, but it’s rock solid.
Geoffrey F. Moore said,
June 28, 2007 @ 6:23 pm
Jungle Disk is the bomb. You should definitely charge more. I would really like to see someone write a virtual machine manager for EC2. No coding required just go to a page and control your Amazon EC2 environment. Also I think we should push back to get better access to broadband at reasonable prices. It would make applications like S3 and Jungle disk even better. I was reading in newsweek that the US is behind Estonia in terms of bandwidth. In Japan they pay $30 for 50 mbps up and down. Could you imagine how awesome Jungle Disk would be if you had 50 mbps up and down to your house.
Paul K said,
July 5, 2007 @ 11:25 am
Nice piece of software. $20 for a lifetime copy for all my machines! Great deal.
Ben C said,
July 6, 2007 @ 9:58 pm
I have been using Jungle Disk for quite some time now and think it’s great. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you guys out, as you’ve greatly helped everyone else!
Stephen said,
July 12, 2007 @ 5:46 pm
Like most other people here, I think $20 for a lifetime purchase is more than reasonable. I wouldn’t completely shut the door on charging for future versions, however. I bought WinZip many many years ago, and for a long time got each new version for nothing. They have now introduced an upgrade charge for recent versions, and I don’t object at all to paying, as it is and always has been a rock solid and consistently useful product. I am assuming they had to do that when the market for zip products was essentially saturated, so when everybody in the world is using Jungle Disk you need to keep the possibility open for a bit of ongoing revenue.
Bob said,
July 15, 2007 @ 11:27 am
I would also suggest that you be careful of setting expectations that are hard to keep over the long haul. I agree that an introductory price would be very helpful to both attract and reward early users. But a “lifetime” is a very long time, and you may get a large number of early users who get a LOT of value from your product. These early users would also likely be willing to pay you a reasonable amount to help support the value they receive. You may consider $20 for 5 years of updates - leaving the door open to either extend the early user discounts at that time or ask for a reasonable value from them at that time.
Jeff McNeill said,
July 16, 2007 @ 1:49 am
Another vote for $20/lifetime, $10/year, $1/month. Frankly, as a network engineer, trying to tell non-techy business people that it is $20 forever doesn’t really work. They don’t understand/trust that it is possible and will actually decide to pay more, because then they feel they are getting more, and that they minimize their risk. We are really dealing with emotions as well as (or in place of) logic, and that is what we see in these comments. I want to also endorse the idea expressed above for paypal and google checkout. Both options would be great, but at least paypal, if possible. Is there a mailing list to announce when we can buy? If so, please sign me up for it. jeff@jeffmcneill.com
Tom M. said,
July 16, 2007 @ 9:33 pm
Awesome news on the pricing. Sign me up. Paypal would be sweet for sure… why not list it on amazon as a download?
I would also echo the “a lifetime is a LONG time” sentiment and would gladly pay more given the quality of JD that I have seen. I have my 30+gb music collection online with it (and have since Jan 07) and use it at work, home and traveling on my laptop. Works like a charm with itunes…
Keep it up guys! Nice job!
-Tom
Mpls Mn USA
Steve Ellwood said,
July 17, 2007 @ 3:53 am
$20.00 for lifetime use?
Cheap.
I’d buy it in a heartbeat.
Craig said,
July 23, 2007 @ 4:14 pm
Any news on when the non Beta will be released? I think the software is superb and therefore feel it only fair to pay you for its use, particularly as the pricing is so fair.
Thanks
Craig
Jungle Dave said,
July 23, 2007 @ 4:19 pm
It’s coming very soon! We’re putting the finishing touches on things now.
g said,
August 16, 2007 @ 1:07 am
Hi, I’ll tell my boss it’s $100 a year, he won’t believe it’s only $20!!!
by the way, I’d love the $10 a year option
Dave, Dave, Dave of the JungleDisk - Bilgistic.com said,
January 25, 2008 @ 12:59 pm
[…] as you want too. Users pay for usage of the Amazon storage cloud (pricing here) directly to Amazon. This fabulous pricing structure was met with user complaints. Why? Because users thought Dave wasn’t charging enough and wouldn’t be able to build a […]