Change is constant. Right now is certainly a time of change for businesses of all shapes and sizes. And we are no different.
Changes have been hyper-accelerated by the current economic situation. In the months since the most recent bubble burst – as measured by the famous Sequoia Capital R.I.P. slidedeck of October ’08 - most startups have either closed shop completely or gotten real serious about turning themselves into sustainable businesses. The events we all read daily about have had an effect on customers as well. Customers now are expecting to pay for services they value and questioning either the sustainability or the value of free software. Feedback from users has been pretty direct on these points.
At Iterasi we will be acting accordingly. We have been giving away way too much for free. Many users have told me this. We have experimented with various business models with some successes. Shortly we will move to a model where we will charge for premium services. As has been rumored for some time (by me mostly) we will be offering for-fee products built on top of our core archiving technologies. The first of these products will be available a little later this summer. These products will be provided as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model billed on a monthly basis. Without leaking too much, let’s just say that if you are in the business of tracking Web-based media, you might like what we will be offering.
We will, however, continue to offer free Iterasi accounts for the foreseeable future. You can expect that there will be some limits on what we provide for free, and a way to increase the features available to you for a reasonable fee.
There are some things we won’t do. We will not do away with your ability to archive pages for free. Nor will we hold the pages you have archived in the past at bay by requiring you to pay to access the pages you already have archived. We may reduce the number of pages that you can archive for free. Likely we will also reduce some of features available for free use. The details are being decided as I write this.
These changes are good for Iterasi as well as our customers. We want to be around to provide our services to as many people and businesses as we can. It’s what we do.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I think this is great Pete and should only improve the breath of products you will offer in the future. I think several businesses will follow suit. Congrats on your leadership in this manner and hope all the best for Iterasi.
We hope the best of success to you with your current and future offerings. We look forward to working with Iterasi for many years to come.
although i understand it might be necessary, but i have to say i'm quite sad to see this to happen. i was an happy iterasi user and loved to see it grow. now i really wish to know what's your plan on how to charge and what free account can still do. this will definitely affect whether i would continue to use it or not.
right now i'm looking at other alternatives and very likely i won't come back. the best part i loved about iterasi was it's like a place your can save your memories and things your treasure like forever. but now i don't know if i can still trust it.
is there anyway to export my pages? now i'm starting to worry that i could lost what i saved…
@gic I am not sure I understand what you are sad about. As I tried to say above, it is not our intention to hold hostage the work you have put in to iterasi. So yes, you will be able to access what you have archived to date. And yes, you will be able to archive more in the future for free. But no, we do not offer an export feature at this time.
Um, we already have the wayback machine from the internet archives, so what's the point of this service?
@anonymous Iterasi allows you to determine what Web pages you wish to archive and we provide a set of services around those pages - public, private, widgets, RSS, etc. Archive.org is a great site but they decide what to record and when. So with iterasi it's up to you what to archive and what to do with it.
Pete: Just want to say thanks for the free "beta" service you are providing. I started iterasing in May ("caching" links referenced in my blog), and so far have taken over 350 snapshots that serve as indisputable trail of "evidence," which is crucial for my blog. So far, my only "complaint," if any, is that the service is sometimes sluggish. Luckily, me and and (most of) my readers are not in a hurry - what we care about is a permanent referenced record, that can be easily reviewed at a later point.
@ECD_Fan Glad you are finding iterasi useful. We have made some improvements in the back-end database so you should be seeing performance pickup.
Are you considering an API to iterasi as part of your fee based service?
Charging is reasonable if you want the service. The problem is that the charges are in $US and since it is artificially managed, a non-Usan never knows what his bill will be.