It has always been my goal to keep SocialToo’s free features free, and paid features paid. I want to make things as easy as possible for you to clean up your stream and learn about your followers with as few hurdles as possible. At the same time, in some way we need to keep the SocialToo service running so we can provide you with the best and most reliable service possible. It’s really hard to do this with a 100% free service.
Last week we announced soon we would be implementing a new, one-time rate plan for our nightly stat e-mails that would enable us to provide those that pay a much more accurate stats experience and higher rate of reliability for both our nightly stats e-mails and auto-follow and unfollow functionality. You may notice when you log into your account now a new overlay shows up telling you about this, giving you the opportunity to pay for the new prioritized service.
As of today you can now pay a 1-time $20 fee which, when it goes into effect Monday, May 11, will put you on a dedicated server (or servers as we get more people paying for the service) that will enable us to run your account much more frequently and also auto-follow and re-cache much more frequently for your account, meaning a much more accurate and reliable service for you. Previous to this, we were only able to guarantee at least once per 24 hours, and as we grew, that time frame would get even larger. With support from our users, we will now be able to expand much further and provide a much more reliable service to you.
To pay for the service, simply log into your account and a popup overlay will show up with a Paypal button you can click on to pay for the service. It’s one-time, and you’ll never pay again for the e-mails. On Monday, May 11, 2009, we’ll turn off the e-mail service for all non-paying accounts (auto-follow and unfollow will still continue) and move all payed accounts over to a dedicated server (or more depending on the number of users we have to process) responsible for prioritizing just these accounts. Those that pay now will be transferred over automatically with no interruption in service. You’ll want to do this soon so you don’t miss out on any e-mails – we cannot re-send past e-mails if you do not pay for the service.
In addition, any new users, starting today can purchase the service immediately, and on Monday will also be included in the prioritized group of users. Those new users will start getting e-mails immediately and will experience no interruption in service when the change goes into effect on Monday.
As always, our auto-follow and unfollow services will always remain free from the time you join SocialToo forward. In addition, you will always be able to create SocialSurveys and share them with your friends for free as we have always provided. We’ll also seek to improve the free and paid versions of these services as we move forward, including more options to stop auto-DM and spam on social networks you belong to.
I hope you can respect our decision to start charging for this specific service as we grow and strive to provide you with the best service possible. It’s a decision that I think in the end will benefit those that choose to partake of it and will enable us to make it even better in the future. I pledge to continue providing you the best service and best tools possible to help you analyze and track your follower base on the Social Networks you belong to. As always, you may contact me personally via our contact@socialtoo.com address with any questions. Consider us your Companion to the Social Web.