Last week someone deleted their JibberJobber account with this message:
“I thought this was a free application and was surprise to see there was a 14 day time limit. When individuals are seeking alternative employment, cost is critical.”
I appreciate the last sentence, helping me understand that unemployed people think cost is critical.
I designed and developed JibberJobber when I was unemployed, and I financed it by draining my 401k, which is now gone. I understand that cost is critical.
Let me clarify a some things:
First, you can easily use JibberJobber for free. The way I designed it is that you can have a free-for-life account that has almost every single feature we’ve built. In fact, a few years ago we took some thirty or forty premium features and moved them to the free side. The free level of JibberJobber is extremely functional.
Second, there is not a “14 day time limit.” What we do is give you a fourteen day trial of the Premium features. After the fourteen days, you go back to the extremely useful and functional free level. Why do we give you fourteen days to try out the premium side? Two reasons: One, so you can easily import your contacts from Outlook, LinkedIn, a spreadsheet, etc. It’s pretty awesome to be able to do a mass import at the beginning, rather than type contacts in one-by-one. We give you fourteen days to do this because, well, you are busy, and you procrastinate. Hopefully two weeks is enough to do this task that takes about ten or twenty minutes (although it can take longer). Two, obviously, we’d love for you to upgrade for only $60/year. To entice you, we let you try out the other premium features, like Email2Log. That’s the number one reason people upgrade… why not try it out for a couple of weeks?
Third, JibberJobber is not government sponsored. Someone has to pay for the people who work on it, and the servers, etc. In a world of “give me free,” or “give me free because I’m unemployed,” and “I got a free game on my phone!!”, we understand that we are weird. But, we have bills to pay, families to feed, etc. And we want to keep working here, on this project, and helping people. If this becomes free, without some way of paying our company bills (like advertisers, which we aren’t super keen on), then I imagine JibberJobber will start to get cobwebs, some broken things, etc. And that will be no fun for anyone.
Sorry that something costs money, but that’s the world we live in. We’ve worked hard to reduce the cost while improving the value to you… something we continue to do every single day.