Fare thee well, Vitalist [Black Belt Productivity]

I was greatly saddened when I learned yesterday that Vitalist has unwisely changed their pricing structure. I had heard about it on another blog (whose name escapes me). So I went to the Vitalist blog, The Net Effect, and read the article detailing the changes.

I was shocked at what I was reading. Basically, the free accounts will let you have 5 contacts/contexts/projects. This is outrageous. You can upgrade to $5/month (Basic) and get 25 + 250MB of storage, and even further to $10/month (Premium) and get unlimited with 1GB of storage.  It seems that they have adapted the Nozbe pricing structure, and that was one of the biggest turn off for me earlier this year.

Now, this is NOT about the money. This is about forcing people to pay to keep the exact same system in place that they had been using for months. I am sure that through the wonders of their administrative powers they could see that, probably, no more than 5% of their users had less than 5 contacts or contexts or projects. So that would make 95% of their users have to upgrade…for the same service that they had been getting for free. My situation was that I had 4-5 contacts, 10+ contexts, and 2 projects. Now, I had been planning on brain dumping a lot of work stuff into Vitalist today which would have added more than 10 contacts and 5 projects.

I could either (1) pay the Basic fee and continue on my merry way, or (2) dramatically alter my system that I had been using since February to stay with the free account. I don’t think that it is right to start charging folks to maintain their status quo. I have no problems with charging a fee for more storage, or additional features like SSL, attachments, or even collaboration (though there is no really monetary outlay for Vitalist on this one). But to tell 95% of their users “We are going to start charging you to use the service EXACTLY like you have been using it for the last XX months” is wrong. Based on the comments on the post, it seems like there are a lot of folks wo feel the same way that I do.

For what it is worth, I chose option (3): Cancel my account.

- Michael, Vitalist Member: Feb 2007-Aug 2007

Original post here: Michael Ramm

17 August 2007 | GTD, Rants, Web app, tools | Comments

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