Streamified Blog

Meet Streamified Subscriptions

Yesterday, we introduced Streamified Subscriptions, something we’ve always known we would be integrating into Streamified (see: Being Penny Poor, a blog post from February 2012, on this very topic). We hope this post gives you a little more insight about what Streamified Subscriptions are and what this means for our free users.

First, to be 100% clear, we are not removing the “Free” price tag from any of our apps, extensions, or products. We are also not removing any features, such as adding multiple social and blog streams, crossposting, or data sync, or making those features paid-only. As our “Being Penny Poor” blog post describes, our goal has always been to provide a great free product to our users while making optional paid/premium features available to those who want them.

Also, at the time of this blog post’s publication, the easiest way to sign up for a Streamified subscription is in your browser. A subscription will carry over with your username no matter which platform you are using Streamified on, from mobile device to web browser. Streamified.me and Android have already been optimized to support faster update speeds, theming, and other features, but with a subscription you’ll see faster update speeds on iOS and the browser extension, too. Also, an update to iOS is coming soon that will let you access other features.

Why Subscriptions?

The technological scope of Streamified is much larger than that of a standard little startup. Our technology connects to dozens of other web services, which means lots of “moving parts” and additional costs. We hook up with DiffBot to show pretty news & blog articles, MailChimp to send summary emails, and of course, many social networks to show your streams. Yet, each of these have costs - be it a monthly subscription fee, or simply the increased load on our server - which total in many thousands of dollars per month. Because of this, we had to make compromises in development, like capping the rate at which users can perform certain actions.

Subscriptions are our way of finally unchaining our technology and removing those limitations. By offering users who wish to have unfettered access the ability to use all these extra features, we can distribute the cost in a way that keeps the existing features of Streamified free.

What’s in a Subscription?

When it came to deciding what, exactly, would be packaged with Streamified Subscriptions, we decided to focus on providing value through “upsell” features that take the experience beyond simple news reading and posting. Looking at our upgrade chart, you can see that the subscriptions start by adding some key speed features (for some information about how Streamified checks for updates, take a look at our recent blog post), and then add more tools and content for those people who might be using Streamified in a business or corporate setting and be interested in, for example, tracking clicks on their links.

A couple features might stick out to those who are already Streamified in a professional capacity:

• Google Analytics can now be integrated with Streamified to automatically track visits to links and images which have been shared
• Collaboration allows you to edit scheduled posts created by other users of your social networks. For example, here at Streamified, I might schedule a post to our @Streamified Twitter account, and Justine might then edit it from the scheduled posts tab in Streamified.me

As we mentioned above, you can check out our upgrade chart for more information about the subscription levels and to see your current status. 

We hope you’ll agree that, by not removing any existing features, yet adding new features for those users who want them, we’ve created a Streamified experience which can be of optimal benefit to all users.