Anyone know how much Carrot costs to use? The button says “Start” using carrot for free, but there’s no indication as to what you get for free, vs. paying for stuff later. And no where on their site do they list any pricing that I could find. So, I know there’s a gotcha at some point, and am curious as to what it is?
We are free for small games, up to 10,000 users. After that we work out something with the developer that works for them. We’ve done price by user, price by click, and flat rate.
What are you hoping we can help you out with?
Let me know if you have any other questions.
-Pat
@pat9 - any possible pricing should definitely be disclosed openly and easily on your site. Full disclosure on stuff like that. But even your answer here leaves a lot of holes. - How do you calculate the 10,000 users? Just installs, active connected users, active users within the last thirty days, or other. Cause how that’s calculated makes a huge difference. I estimate based on my last game plus my new marketing techniques that I’ll have more than 10k downloads in the first few weeks. But I’ll probably only have a few hundred to a few thousand active users in any one day, unless it goes huge. Most other services don’t start charging until you’ve got hundreds of thousands of users. So this seems low to me, and depending on how it’s calculated could be even lower. - saying “we work something out” if you hit the 10k user limit isn’t good enough. You need to be specific. Other services have pricing structures, and only say “contact us” if you get way up high on the user count. Like over millions of users. What I hear when you say “we’ll work it out,” is that you could force me into a bad deal once that time comes. Because I have nothing in writing to know what the deal would be. There are other ways I could go right now while I’m coding, so to wait until it’s out there and then have to recode to remove it cause it’s too expensive isn’t a good plan. Cause if I get to 10k and you turn it off cause we can’t work it out, then I’m being held over a barrel and will lose momentum. I’m not saying that’s what you’ll do. I’m just saying that without disclosing stuff, you leave the developers in a bad situation. And it looks fishy to boot.
Plus to be honest I’m still not sure how your service differs from just coding strait to Facebook myself. It’s just not all that clear on your site. I think I kinda know the difference but I’m not sure. The only benefit I can see, and even this is a guess based on the site, is that I could change the kinds of posts by my users from your site rather than hard coding them into my app. So change on the fly. Other than that, I don’t know any other benefits.
10k monthly posting users. So if they don’t post through the service, they don’t count.
Our software is aimed at people who are serious about user acquisition and want to do things like A/B testing, in-depth analysis of their player-base and such. It is nice of other services to give away their stuff for free. We believe you get what you pay for.
@Pat9: Still, I do not see the advantage of this
Actually, I do not “understand” why one should use your service… :huh:
Because what is the point of using such a third party service if the necessary code remains basically the same, there is a limited user count, and the pricing remains totally hidden until you hit this limit…
I have been using the Facebook Graph api with Flurry Analytics for free. Maybe I am missing something obvious (which is “hidden” on your website) that would make my life easier or add some extra functionality to my FB/analytics stuff…
@pat9 I agree with cinetek – I’d never start using a service where the fee was hidden; the downside is too great. You may have the best service in the world, but you’re making it very hard for people to even consider using it.
When I hear “contact us for the price” (anywhere, not just in your case) I think “rip-off”, because then the company can change the price based on how much money they think the prospect has, which is unfair. So you foster an environment of untrustworthiness right away.
I understand the marketing reason for not displaying the price is so you can promote the value to the prospect before revealing the price (usually done because your price is higher than the competition), but I’m not convinced that’s a workable long-term strategy. Maybe it is for your company, but it might be something to consider.
Jay
@pat9 - I am 100% confident that I will breach your 10k limit, based on the success of my last game, it’s fan-base, and my marketing plan for this new game. Part of my marketing plan revolves around free-for-the-day, and or free versions, with IAP to unlock full game, etc. On my last game, I had moments where my downloads exceeded 50k per day during my free offerings, and my freemium versions have breached 10k per day consistently for over a year now. And since my user acquisition strategy is to use Facebook postings and tweets from my users (all users, including free users) to drive sales, I will definitely be breaching your 10k limit.
But, you still haven’t given a clue as to what the service costs once that limit is breached. Anyone looking at any service, needs to know the pricing breakdown prior to putting it in their app. Any sane person at least. Now maybe it’s something like $1.00 per 10k-100k users. But if it’s more like $0.05 - $0.10 per user, and I’m pumping 300k free users through it per month, and acquiring only 2k paid users for my efforts, then I’m screwed. (2000 paid users x $0.69 = $1380 profit , but 300,000 free users x $0.05 = $15,000 debt owed). There are some services that charge $20-99 per million units, or 100k users, etc, but there are also services that charge as much as $0.10 per user. So, you can see it’s REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT to know what a service costs, to know if it’s viable.
if you’d rather contact me directly you can do so, either through this forum, or via my information I provided Carrot when I signed up. But I believe the pricing structure needs to be publicly disclosed. Cause, seriously, no one in their right mind would sign up for a service without knowing the facts. So, it’s for everyone’s best interest (including Carrot’s) to disclose this. If your company is so new that you really don’t even know what you should be charging, then you should still sit down and figure it out ASAP. Modify it later, if you need to, but you should have some idea of what your service is worth, and you should not be hiding it.
I was intrigued about Carrot but I have exactly the same questions posted above and have yet to see any answers. Pat can you please post your value proposition as opposed to us coding direct to FB? Having a clear pricing statement will definitely help as well. Thank you.
We are free for small games, up to 10,000 users. After that we work out something with the developer that works for them. We’ve done price by user, price by click, and flat rate.
What are you hoping we can help you out with?
Let me know if you have any other questions.
-Pat
@pat9 - any possible pricing should definitely be disclosed openly and easily on your site. Full disclosure on stuff like that. But even your answer here leaves a lot of holes. - How do you calculate the 10,000 users? Just installs, active connected users, active users within the last thirty days, or other. Cause how that’s calculated makes a huge difference. I estimate based on my last game plus my new marketing techniques that I’ll have more than 10k downloads in the first few weeks. But I’ll probably only have a few hundred to a few thousand active users in any one day, unless it goes huge. Most other services don’t start charging until you’ve got hundreds of thousands of users. So this seems low to me, and depending on how it’s calculated could be even lower. - saying “we work something out” if you hit the 10k user limit isn’t good enough. You need to be specific. Other services have pricing structures, and only say “contact us” if you get way up high on the user count. Like over millions of users. What I hear when you say “we’ll work it out,” is that you could force me into a bad deal once that time comes. Because I have nothing in writing to know what the deal would be. There are other ways I could go right now while I’m coding, so to wait until it’s out there and then have to recode to remove it cause it’s too expensive isn’t a good plan. Cause if I get to 10k and you turn it off cause we can’t work it out, then I’m being held over a barrel and will lose momentum. I’m not saying that’s what you’ll do. I’m just saying that without disclosing stuff, you leave the developers in a bad situation. And it looks fishy to boot.
Plus to be honest I’m still not sure how your service differs from just coding strait to Facebook myself. It’s just not all that clear on your site. I think I kinda know the difference but I’m not sure. The only benefit I can see, and even this is a guess based on the site, is that I could change the kinds of posts by my users from your site rather than hard coding them into my app. So change on the fly. Other than that, I don’t know any other benefits.
10k monthly posting users. So if they don’t post through the service, they don’t count.
Our software is aimed at people who are serious about user acquisition and want to do things like A/B testing, in-depth analysis of their player-base and such. It is nice of other services to give away their stuff for free. We believe you get what you pay for.
@Pat9: Still, I do not see the advantage of this
Actually, I do not “understand” why one should use your service… :huh:
Because what is the point of using such a third party service if the necessary code remains basically the same, there is a limited user count, and the pricing remains totally hidden until you hit this limit…
I have been using the Facebook Graph api with Flurry Analytics for free. Maybe I am missing something obvious (which is “hidden” on your website) that would make my life easier or add some extra functionality to my FB/analytics stuff…
@pat9 I agree with cinetek – I’d never start using a service where the fee was hidden; the downside is too great. You may have the best service in the world, but you’re making it very hard for people to even consider using it.
When I hear “contact us for the price” (anywhere, not just in your case) I think “rip-off”, because then the company can change the price based on how much money they think the prospect has, which is unfair. So you foster an environment of untrustworthiness right away.
I understand the marketing reason for not displaying the price is so you can promote the value to the prospect before revealing the price (usually done because your price is higher than the competition), but I’m not convinced that’s a workable long-term strategy. Maybe it is for your company, but it might be something to consider.
Jay
@pat9 - I am 100% confident that I will breach your 10k limit, based on the success of my last game, it’s fan-base, and my marketing plan for this new game. Part of my marketing plan revolves around free-for-the-day, and or free versions, with IAP to unlock full game, etc. On my last game, I had moments where my downloads exceeded 50k per day during my free offerings, and my freemium versions have breached 10k per day consistently for over a year now. And since my user acquisition strategy is to use Facebook postings and tweets from my users (all users, including free users) to drive sales, I will definitely be breaching your 10k limit.
But, you still haven’t given a clue as to what the service costs once that limit is breached. Anyone looking at any service, needs to know the pricing breakdown prior to putting it in their app. Any sane person at least. Now maybe it’s something like $1.00 per 10k-100k users. But if it’s more like $0.05 - $0.10 per user, and I’m pumping 300k free users through it per month, and acquiring only 2k paid users for my efforts, then I’m screwed. (2000 paid users x $0.69 = $1380 profit , but 300,000 free users x $0.05 = $15,000 debt owed). There are some services that charge $20-99 per million units, or 100k users, etc, but there are also services that charge as much as $0.10 per user. So, you can see it’s REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT to know what a service costs, to know if it’s viable.
if you’d rather contact me directly you can do so, either through this forum, or via my information I provided Carrot when I signed up. But I believe the pricing structure needs to be publicly disclosed. Cause, seriously, no one in their right mind would sign up for a service without knowing the facts. So, it’s for everyone’s best interest (including Carrot’s) to disclose this. If your company is so new that you really don’t even know what you should be charging, then you should still sit down and figure it out ASAP. Modify it later, if you need to, but you should have some idea of what your service is worth, and you should not be hiding it.
I was intrigued about Carrot but I have exactly the same questions posted above and have yet to see any answers. Pat can you please post your value proposition as opposed to us coding direct to FB? Having a clear pricing statement will definitely help as well. Thank you.