Money
The prices for Sprend Pro is going up, and we are adding new currencies. But why?
Price increase
On October 1, 2020, we are raising prices for Sprend Pro from 540 SEK per year to 720 SEK per year, a 33% increase.
Why are we doing this?
To make more money. We are going to use the money for advertising (Google Ads), a new visual profile, and for hiring programmers. Sprend has great unfulfilled potential and things are just moving too slowly when I am the only hacker at the office. More money means more speed.
Is it going to work out?
Hopefully, yes. The competitors will still be more expensive after our price increase. If it works out badly we can always change the prices again.
Even more importantly, we will soon offer Sprend in more currencies than SEK, namely EUR, GBP and USD. It’s no surprise we currently have most of our customers in Sweden. Let’s change that too.
New price list
| Plan | EUR | SEK | GBP | USD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sprend Pro 12 months | €70 | 720 kr | £62 | $85 |
| Sprend Pro 1 month | €9 | 92 kr | £8 | $11 |
We are dropping the 3-month plan in favor of a 1-month plan, in line with competitors’ offerings.
By signing up for a year you get 4 months for free compared with the 1-month plan, €70 instead of €9 x 12 = €108. I think that makes sense since the user would normally take a vacation, even from sprending, during the year.
Easy as one-two-three
This is a step-by-step instruction on how to make software. It’s as easy as C64 BASIC.
This is a step-by-step instruction on how to make software:
10 Select one thing to do
20 Build it together
30 Confirm that users are happy
40 Go to 10
This method also, incidentally, summarizes Agile development.
I’ve been developing software for 25 years. The craft is hard enough as it is. You don’t want to make it harder with difficult processes.
Select one thing and build it together. Why only one? Because, in a team, you don’t want to let anyone skip testing. There can be no cherry-picking of fun tasks and letting someone else do the boring stuff. We also don’t want to have unfinished work pile up.
Build the feature together, learn from each other, help each other. You will share the fun and the boring tasks.
Release it and watch users use the new feature. Learn. Adjust.
What about time estimations? Let the person interested in time also create the estimations. Let the rest of us focus on what really matters: happy users and happy team members.
In our 15th year
Sprend started in 2004 as skickafilen.se. Thanks to the Wayback Machine we can show a screenshot of the original user interface.
Sprend started in 2004 as skickafilen.se. Thanks to the Wayback Machine we can show a screenshot of the original user interface.
I had traffic signs in mind when designing the logo and general ui.
In 2008 we changed the domain name to sprend.com to have a more language neutral name. “Sprend” sounds a bit like “send” and can be used as a verb.
In 2011 we released the paid subscription, Sprend Pro. And last year, 2018, was the first year when our revenue was able support a full time employee, i.e. petit moi.
Slow entrepreneurship, we’ve entered our 15th year (“we” = pluralis maiestatis). The future is bright.
This post marks the reboot of the Sprend Blog.