Regional pricing

[justthesea]

Hi all,

I’m from India and would like to buy the Pro version of Write.as but the annual price of $60 seems much more suited to the western world, than our economic realities. I wondered if you could please consider adding regional pricing, so we could actually afford this wonderful suite of products!

This was also requested on another thread in detail:

Adding Comments to your Blog

The problem is all of those products are targeted towards western markets, including Write.as. I think going forward price localization should be considered as part of the federated business model. Because let me tell you what it feels like to pay for each of those services as an university student from a developing country: Write.as Pro subscription normally costs 60$ per year(Less with student discount), which equals to about 400 units in my local currency, Commento also costs 60$ per year a…

[matt]

Thanks for bringing this up @justthesea, and for your kind words! I’m glad we’ve built something you’re so interested in.

We’ve considered regional pricing in the past, but unfortunately it’s very difficult for a tiny company like ours to support it. And ultimately, I’d like to support writers around the world in other ways.

Since our software, WriteFreely, is free and open source, anyone can run it without paying our hosting fees. So we’re looking outside our company to make hosting available in places like India, and we actually encourage anyone with the technical ability to offer their own WriteFreely hosting and charge for it.

In the grand scheme, we’d rather have many WriteFreely hosting companies based locally in various countries, instead of offering regional pricing. I feel this would be the best way for our bootstrapped company to serve people in different economic situations, especially because every country’s people understand their own situation better than we do.

As an example, last week we announced a collaboration with our first trusted hosting provider, based out of Albania:

Welcoming Our Partner, Cloud68.co

We’d like to continue doing this. So I’d like to mention that if anyone is interested in partnering on this, please let us know!

[redonski]

Hi @justthesea, Redon from C68 here. As a person living and working in an in-development country, I have the same request from many companies from time to time and the same need when i see services that have the same price worldwide. Even worse, some of these companies have globalized their software development production line by outsourcing their software development jobs to in development countries, paying local wages, but keeping their product prices flat worldwide. Addressing this issue gets even more complicated to when there are small open source initiatives such as the one @matt, our small team or others are running, but with limited resources. My proposal is (a) to talk more about this at a macro and ethical level and (b) build a solidarity network to help each other at a more local and ethical level. In this context I’d be more than happy to help you though our initiative or guide you on how you can host Write Freely yourself. Feel free to schedule a call or contact me directly and me and my colleagues will do our best to support you.
ps: @matt thanks for mentioning us.

R.S

[justthesea]

Thank you so much for what I must say is a very relatable response. It does strike me that you know and understand exactly what struggles we face!

I would love to have a chat with you. While I might not be able to take this forward in a personal capacity, it might be worth exploring if and how I could contact some free software orgs in my country and collaborate with them to try and get this sorted ultimately.

I have a host of concerns and queries. If I can find the time, I’ll read through any available documentation, post which I’ll schedule a call with you. Thanks for extending your help!