DISQUS

Al · 2 years ago

Nice one Dennis,You have obviously spent quite a lot of time on this, I know how much is involved in these types of posts!!

I agree on the costs, it seems out of proportion to the requirement compared to the individual services. The whole service pricing is yet to be tested in a full competitive market place.

I will be riffing on this(and your other SAAS costing post ) post shortly.

regards
Al

Jason · 2 years ago

If you're looking to add time tracking to complement a Basecamp plan that doesn't have time tracking, I'd give Harvest a try. It's simple to set up and integrates nicely with Basecamp.

Mike McDerment · 2 years ago

Nice write up Dennis - thanks for taking the time to do such a thorough job.

Re price and FreshBooks/Basecamp - I guess I'm a little confused. Can you tell me how many BaseCamp projects you need to manage in Basecamp and how many clients and staff you need to manage in FreshBooks? With that information I will reply in full.

-Mike

Dennis Howlett · 2 years ago

Mike - you're right to be confused - I was for several hours before picking my way through what I believe is likely to happen.

This is a pricing issue where one vendor prices one way, another prices differently and it leads to a conflict.

Basecamp prices per project. I take that to be a discrete piece of work with multiples user/inputs. You price per user. See where that goes?

My assumption was that in a reasonable sized VSB/SMB then I'd probably need 2 accounts type (me + backup) people and I'd need a certain number of projects. Because of the current price breaks, that makes a *reasonable* combined figure of the kind I describe.

There is no easy answer without breaking revenue models but it illustrates the different way of thinking as exists between 'departments.'

I'm not sure of the answer. I tried to pose the value question which I think is much more importantthan pure cost but I'm not sure I presented a totally convincing argument. I'm also mindful that VSB/SMB doesn't necessarily think in those terms.

If this makes sense then over to you.

Al · 2 years ago

Actually a in many cases a full blow Basecamp + Freshbooks approach could be overkill.

For time tracking one could even use GCal as part of Google Apps, this combined with Google spreadsheets could provide a poor mans project management.

In fact for a really poor man's version you might not even need Freshbooks, just use GSpreadsheet and share those via email with your clients!

Worth thinking about.

Mike McDerment · 2 years ago

Fair enough Dennis.

Just so we are clear, if you use FreshBooks' time tracking capabilities instead of Basecamp's, you and one staff could use FreshBooks to track time on unlimited projects in FreshBooks for FREE - no expiry...period. Let's say you have ten projects on the go, that will cost you $24's for Basecamp - whether you use FreshBooks or not. If you need to bill 25 clients that would cost you $14 for FreshBooks, bringing your total to about $39. To track time and bill for the same number of clients with Basecamp and Blinksale would costs you $12 for blinksale + $50 for Basecamp because you'd need to pay for their time tracking version, so your total is $62.

Does that add up to you?

Cheers,

- Mike

Al · 2 years ago

After surveying various service pricing on different web sites I decided to create a collaborative matrix to track pricing. please take a look and add in any missing information or services (SaaS) that would interest businesses.

Please feel free to use this.

regards
Al