We’ve got a lot of great stuff happening this week, including the planned launch of the new Jungle Disk Server Edition and Jungle Disk Simply Backup products, the release of Jungle Disk 3.0 Desktop and Workgroup Editions, as well as a whole new website redesign. As part of this rollout, we are making some changes to our pricing structure that I wanted to explain here first.
Before I get into the specific pricing, I want to make it clear that this pricing only applies to new subscriptions. We’re not changing pricing on existing subscriptions retroactively and have no plans to do so going forward.
After the 3.0 rollout, the pricing for new Jungle Disk subscriptions will be:
- Jungle Disk Simply Backup: $2/month, with 5GB of free storage
- Jungle Disk Desktop Edition: $3/month, with 5GB of free storage
- Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition: $4/month, with 10GB of free storage
- Jungle Disk Server Edition: $5/month, with 10GB of free storage
Although prices are increasing for Desktop and Workgroup edition, we’re including free Cloud Files or managed Amazon S3 storage that mostly offsets the pricing difference. The free storage is pooled across the entire account, so if you have multiple Workgroup or Server subscriptions the included storage can be used by any of your computers.
So why are we changing prices, and why include free storage with each subscription? There were several reasons for making the change:
- We’re beefing up our support operation, moving from 5 day a week business hour support to 7 day a week business hour support. We plan to expand support options further going forward. The new pricing structure helps us ensure we can continue to improve our support for all customers.
- We’ve found that many less technically savvy users have no idea how much online storage space they will need. Often times the only point of reference is that their computer has a 500GB or 1TB hard drive, so they think the service is more expensive than it really is. In reality, most Jungle Disk users have 10GB of storage or less. By including a healthy amount of free storage we help casual computer users better understand the amount of space they may expect to use.
- Many Workgroup administrators have complained about lack of predictable monthly costs for the service, due to the variable pricing on storage. While this change doesn’t eliminate that, it helps control it for many situations. We’re looking at offering quota support and other features in the future to give Workgroup admins more control over their storage costs.
While changing prices is never an easy decision, it’s important for us to have a pricing structure in place going forward that keeps the business healthy and addresses the needs of both customers and the business.