Going freemium

Happy holidays! Guess what? I have a gift for you (sort of). More on that shortly. Before we get to that, though, let’s talk a little bit about needs and motivation.

It’s been several years since I wrote the first line of code for Shubox. From that first hacking session until today my goal has always been to make something that would be useful to me, and people like me — people who work on the web. It’s always been, first and foremost, a scratch of my own itch. To that point I feel that I’ve succeeded. I use Shubox all the damn time.

When I would work on client projects and the need to upload, resize, do much with AWS S3, then I would suggest using Shubox and be done with it. It worked. It saved me a tremendous amount of time. For those clients, it was also ultimately free! Most of their use cases were esspecialy unique and I was able to learn a lot about what my they needed vis a vis Shubox. The trade — feedback for service.

It was an easy justification because most of these clients weren’t in need high volume file or image uploading. As a result a conversation similar to “You know, I have this service that you should pay $49 a month for. Yes, to upload a few photos for the 3 or 4 products you add to your catalog every month” never happened.

In a business’s lifecycle there are long stretches where needs evolve. Coming out of the gates for an initial launch usually doesn’t need a Kubernetes cluster, distributed messaging systems, hadoop, tensorflow, bloopity bloop, whatever. A few dynos on Heroku, droplets on DigitalOcean, or VPS’s on Linode should be ok. Exception handling, google analytics, Sendgrid, and maybe a Squarespace account would round out a lot of the first absolute must-haves.

Most of those things have something in common. You can start out using them for free. Of course some of the leading services people could reach for in Shubox’s space also have free tiers.

I won’t belabor the point - Shubox should have a free tier. Shubox is something that people with low usage, or are just starting out, should be able to use for a while to see if it’s right for them. This much is true.

As a result, as of today, anyone who signs up for an account on Shubox will be able to use it free, forever, or until they need more, bigger, better service. For more information on the different tiers, visit the pricing section on the home page, or get in touch down below and to the right with the “Send a message” button! I’ll be on the other end.

Merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah! Happy Kwanzaa! And a lovely Festivus for the rest of us.