Compare to Clover: Pricing
This is the first in the series of comparisons.
Let me let you in on a little “industry secret”: Website companies make money one of two ways… They either make their money from the initial creation of the site, or they make money on the hosting.
Most of the time what you’ll see is an attempt at a little bit of both… They’ll make their site priced just low enough so you feel like you are getting a deal, then the hosting is priced high (hoping that you will feel like you got a good deal on the initial site price, so the monthly cost ends up being worth it).
I will attempt to give you a good filter to help you make the best possible decision with your new ministry website.
1. Higher up front fee, with (hopefully) lower monthly costs:
On a holistic level, we feel this is the best way to choose any product. Whether you’re purchasing a car or a website, this is a much more “real” way of buying something. The costs are completely understood up front, without major obligations or pressure placed on you month to month (which especially in these economic times could vary monthly). This places a real value on the product, and encourages consumers to save up and make sure it’s what they really want before purchasing.
Understand too, this method isn’t nearly as sexy for the manufacturer… With a higher price point, the seller of the product bears the burden of convincing the consumer that it is worth a higher up front cost, especially in an industry where others are offering the “same” product for a cheaper up front cost.
2. Lower up front fee, with higher monthly costs (typically described as “hosting”):
This method of sales is a bit deceiving. The goal is to get the consumer to be attracted to the product by the low price, but really make money over the next 6 months to a year through “hosting” costs. However long you stay with the company past those 6 months to a year is a bonus to the company, making exponentially more than they expected to (or needed to) off the sale of the site.
Unfortunately for a lot of smaller ministries, it’s a lot easier to pay monthly than to save up and pay up front.
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Clover’s Perspective:
1. Up front costs: When approaching purchasing a website, you really need to ask yourself, “What is the value of what I am paying for in comparison to what I am actually paying?” We can actually tell you what the value of what our product is because of our experience as custom designers over the past few years. If we were to create one of our Clover website designs for you from scratch with a content management system as easy and intuitive as The Greenhouse, we would easily charge somewhere in the $25K – $50K range. (If that sounds unbelievable, realize that Clover is in a very different league than Bob’s Web Design down the street).
After creating our product, we took a step back and asked the question “What price point is affordable to most ministries in order to equip them to do ministry, but still brings value to the product we’ve created?” We realized that the $1000 mark does just this… Not to mention the fact that the number is completely above-board. As silly as it might seem to true “salesmen”, we could have easily said $999 and probably sold more sites because it’s easier to pay $900(ish) than $1000. We really believe in being completely transparent to ministries, knowing that God would honor our honesty.
2. Monthly Hosting: Ok… We did the math. If you’re thinking about going with someone with lower up front costs but higher monthly “hosting” fees, listen up.
Other possible solutions out there have hosting options ranging from $30/month for less than a gig of storage and transfer (which is a joke… especially with the creation of this thing called videos), to $250/month for like 20 gigs of storage and transfer.
Here’s the deal. After pricing everything out (with premier hosting at Media Temple and having everything backed up so your site is always safe), and including our support team of real people that you can actually call on the phone, the break-even point is right around $20/month. This is also with 100+ gigs of storage and transfer. In case you just missed that, over 100 gigs worth of storage (equivalent to around 5000 full-length sermons) for $20/month, compared to $250/month for 20 gigs. You could literally rent 3 of your own dedicated servers with about a terabyte of space for that kind of money. So you do the math…
All we want is for you to be educated on this stuff so you can make the right decision for your ministry.
Just because a product is “on sale” for $500, don’t forget to check out the monthly costs combined with the initial cost. Over the course of 6 months to a year you might be paying 3x as much as you would have with a better solution.
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Read the next Compare to Clover article on Design
Posted on May 14th, 2009 under Company News by Jim with no comments.