Important Changes to Hiveage Pricing
Update on June 6, 2017: The following article announced the discontinuation of our free plan. Since then, we have introduced a Free Invoice Generator, which lets anyone create elegant invoices—closely resembling the standard invoice template in Hiveage—in PDF format.
Over the past eight years, Hiveage (and its predecessor, CurdBee) has been the trusted online invoicing and billing platform for more than 50,000 small businesses and freelancers, from 140 countries all over the world. Being a part of so many entrepreneurial journeys has been a joy and privilege for our small team.
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With Hiveage you can send elegant invoices to your customers, accept online payments, and manage your team — all in one place.
Like almost all of our customers, Hiveage too is a small business. We are a bootstrapped company, without external funding. Throughout the years, we have relied solely on the support from our customers to build and maintain Hiveage. This relationship has allowed us to grow together with the businesses that depend on Hiveage to manage their finances.
One key factor that helped us reach so many customers was our adoption of the freemium model. Our free plan let you send unlimited invoices to an unlimited number of clients. Additional features such as estimates and quotations, time, expense and mileage tracking, recurring and auto-billing, and team management came with our premium plans.
After a comprehensive business review a couple of months ago, we realized that it was now time to rethink our business model for Hiveage. Our user base was growing fast, but our team remained small. To ensure a consistently high quality of service along with sustainable growth, without affecting our team culture, we had to make some important calls.
One of them was to end our free plan, and to continue only with our premium plans.
However, before making this decision official, we wanted to hear from our free customers. We called more than 500 people personally. For those we could not reach, we sent more than 3000 personal emails. The feedback we received—both in support and against—was very valuable when figuring out the best way forward.
After carefully reviewing the responses from our users, we have decided to replace our free plan and move forward with premium plans.
For current free users, the free plan will not end immediately: it will be continued till September 20, 2016. Upgrading your free account to Lite or to a higher premium plan (starting from $19/month) would be required for the continued use of your Hiveage account after this date.
We’re also discontinuing the custom plan option for new sign ups. If you are already on a custom plan, this pricing change will not affect you in any way.
Along with the pricing update, we’re also introducing many improvements to Hiveage. Our important security upgrade, which is scheduled to go live this week, will include a streamlined user profile management process. We have enabled an effective password authentication procedure and a log to keep track of different user logins. In July, the all-new Hiveage iOS mobile app will be available on the App Store. Detailed reports, inventory management and accepting payments via ACH are all scheduled for Q3 this year.
The newly-introduced Hiveage Lite,a highly affordable entry-level plan, will cost just $2 per month, charged yearly, and will include the following features:
[Update (Sep 29, 2016): We have discontinued the Lite plan.]
- 20 connections (clients and vendors)
- 100 invoices
- 1 user
- 250MB storage
- File attachments
- PayPal Standard gateway
- Razorpay gateway
- Option to remove Hiveage branding
On a final note, the entire Hiveage team would like to express their gratitude to all users who shared their feedback on this decision. We are really happy to say that most of them trust that our timely decision will bring the best out of Hiveage in the years to come.
To all our free users: thank you for the trust and faith you have had on Hiveage for the last eight years. We dearly wish that many of you would continue your journey with us by converting to our affordable Lite Plan, or a higher plan if that suits you. Either way, we respect and value your final decision wholeheartedly.
If you have any questions or need more clarifications on these changes, please write to us at [email protected].
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