What About Pricing?

Right now, the big question we’re getting from folks is: “What will Aboard cost?” Some people want to know because they live in other countries and can’t afford U.S. rates. Some people want to know because unless they know our business model, they don’t feel they can trust us. It runs the gamut from curious suspicion to suspicious curiosity. But it’s nice to be asked.

Here’s what we’re thinking. Please note we can change our minds! It will be a few months to roll out pricing. Anything could happen. Plus there are a ton of new features that are landing that will make people desperate, desperate to pay (we tell ourselves). But anyway. Here’s where we’re at, so you can make a good decision for yourself:

• We’ll have a completely reasonable free tier. Anyone on Earth can add hundreds of cards in a few boards, and send out a few invitations. This corresponds to how people are using Aboard now—for private, likely personal stuff. The vast majority of you would be under the free tier.
• There will be one or more paid tiers. If you want thousands of cards, lots of boards, to invite bunches of people, CSV upload and download—you’d pay a fancy coffee at Starbucks” amount of money per month (or as many as two coffees, but you get the idea). Much less than other data-tools companies. There are a lot of new features in the pipeline so I’m excited to be able to say, “But wait! There’s more!” over and over again as we tell you what you’ll get for your money.
• We’ll be generous. The co-founders of Aboard were, in the past, extremely broke. And many of the people building Aboard are in Beirut, speaking of exchange rates. If you’re a student, a dot-org, or in a country where dollars trade high, we’ll try to figure something out (I mean, ask us).
• If you’re an influencer who wants to organize your videos, affiliate links, and events using Aboard, we’d help you out, too, and maybe even pay you to use the product (in a disclosable way, influencer marketing is pretty gross). If you know an influencer (think like, YouTube gardening or synth nerds, not PewDiePie) with a following in the thousands or TRILLIONS who would use something like this, by all means, tell us and we’ll reach out to them politely.
• If you’re a large org that wants to do large-org things around custom data, audit trails, auth, and rights management, we’d love to buy you coffee and listen to you complain about your current software situation. Aboard is a highly adaptable platform that your employees will hate much less than other tools. We’re a young company and you could probably get an amazing deal. Just saying.

Again! We can change our minds. I might enlist in a cult and suddenly seek to charge a billion dollars per card in order to fund my guru’s essential oils habit. But…we’re an NYC company. Not a Bay Area company. Namaste.

So it’s probably going to look something like that. We’d love feedback on the above. Take our survey—or write us if you have even more thoughts. “I would never pay for this,” is obviously a data point. That’s fine; many billions of people will never pay for Aboard. But: “I would pay this amount for Aboard, but after that it would be kind of meh” is very helpful, as is, “I would pay a certain amount for Aboard if it did certain things it doesn’t do now, or did other things in a smarter way.” Now that’s gold. That’s amazing. Do that.

Personally, I am excited to have coupons. There’s just something about slinging product and throwing out codes and just hustling. I cannot wait to say, “If you invite your friends with code SNURBLEBOBBLE they’ll get six months free.” I love that stuff. You might think I’m joking but you’d be wrong. I grew up in a coupon household and nothing feels better than to be the coupon-maker myself. Yeah, yeah, founder this and founder that. But let’s be honest about software in 2023: Coupons.