Litmus

Hi guys - I'd love to love your service - but I can't because it's too expensive. I'm not thinking you're going to publish this - I'm just letting you know IMHO you're leaving yourselves wide open from undercutters who will build a product that's "there or thereabouts" and they'll capture the whole market of designers and hackers happy to pay a little and they'll probably get the "liberal designer elite" anyway if they do a good enough job - I don't do testing enough to justify your cost, but I do do it enough to not bother messing around with your smaller daily charge setup either.

Genuinely best regards,
Duncan

Hi Duncan,

Thanks for your excellent feedback, it's not often people are so honest with us, I really appreciate it.

Pricing is very tricky, unlike a lot of web apps, we have very real costs that lead to smaller margins. As well as the front-end, database-driven, web application, we have a heavy back end, spread across 3 operating systems, to manage as well.

With regards to email testing, we're far cheaper than the competitors (and offer unlimited testing). I suspect you were referring to browser testing, though. Browser testing is interesting, while I'm very confident that our service is superior (our UI alone is a huge improvement on any competition, I feel) I'm certainly aware that there are cheaper options available that may lose us some customers. Charging $49 a month for unlimited browser and email testing (not to mention the other benefits that come with a Litmus subscription, including publishing results, validating your source, zip file downloads and lots more to come) feels very fair, and many, many users chose our service over the various free alternatives available.

We're always keen to hear feedback about our prices, but when our competitors are offering lower-quality versions of our service for *free*, yet many subscribers continue to chose Litmus instead, we can't help but feel we're on the right track.

Do you mind if I ask how much you'd be willing to pay for a Litmus account? Is there anything we offer that you'd be happy to forgo for a lower monthly subscription?

Thanks again for your feedback!

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Matthew

Great service, but it is not clear in what browser the web-based email clients are captured! Since the different web-based email clients adjust the email's HTML in different way's (because it could conflict with their GUI), it would be nice to see the HTML rendering of the email's in different browsers.

John: Thanks! With regard to the browser used to view the webmail email clients, we're currently using Explorer 7 for all of them. We're intending to add the option to see them in Firefox and Safari too in the near future.

I agree too. I would be really interested in this for testing emails. I only do a mailer once a monce maybe bi-monthly and it is only a list of subscribers of say 400-500. £200/$200 is nowhere near close to being a justifiable expense regardless of the quality of product.

for email testing, what about a per send tariff?

I love what I have seen of the system, but from the pricing page you instantly see your core market is agencies - acting as reseller of services than individual designers and mailers, which is a perfectly acceptable business model.