Ask HN: Flaregun - Manage domains and SSL certificates - Would you pay for this?

Your notification periods sound spot on. Early (1 month) to allow purchase order & client holidays + potentially clients wanting to let a domain lapse. The system could then do another whois lookup expiry check before sending out the 1 week left reminder.

I take your point about the monthly subscription model. Thinking of the monthly services I pay for I tend to log in pretty regularly. As you say Flaregun isn't really like this. You would dump your domains into it when you first sign up, then login every so often to add a new domain (10-30 seconds). So payment options are:

1. Keep it monthly and perhaps reduce price.

2. Charge a one off fee (local program) - it could even be some kind of spreadsheet addon. However I favour a webapp as it is the easiest incarnation to iterate and further develop. Also a local program would need to always be running to display / send the notifications.

3. Yearly subscription. Domains are yearly so this would kind of tie in. Getting into a customers head if you thought Flaregun solved a problem for you, you probably would be fairly loyal - i.e. it's not a try it, see if I like and if I get on with it I will keep it kind of product. You either want it or you don't. But I always feel an upfront yearly cost increases the barrier to subscription. I wonder if a yearly cost with a 100% money back guarantee if not satisfied, could be the answer.

Any other thoughts / ideas appreciated.

Cheers,

Out of interest do you develop websites on behalf on your clients or is it just web/email hosting?

I am trying to figure out the core market for Flaregun. I think it is really targeted at web design agencies which handle a clients complete web presence.

The last company I worked at, a small web agency, was a reseller (Enom) and like you would buy domains on behalf of clients. However a lot of our clients wanted to buy the domains themselves so they had full ownership. So we had a situation where we owned and renewed 70 odd domains and then the rest (100+) were owned by 40 odd clients (some legacy) across as many registrars. Tracking all these domains was just not possible. Some were bound to slip.

"i tell them they're responsible for renewing them (which i use as a selling point for why they should transfer them to me)" - this is a completely reasonable policy which completely covers you. However perhaps this "I told you so" attitude wouldn't work in all situations. I guess it depends on the relationship with the client. If it is just hosting then yeah you can take that stance. However clients paid my old company to handle their web presence, sometimes on high traffic websites were downtime was not acceptable. In this instance their expectation was a little higher, and preventing potential problems like this was assumed to be a responsibility of the web agency.

Your thoughts on the free vs paid for plans are interesting. A few of my thoughts:

1. Perhaps it would make sense to get rid of the corporate plan (as you say anyone with this many domains would already have a well sorted billing / renewal system in place)

2. Make the agency plan unlimited (chances are they wouldn't have more than 500 est domains).

3. I see the professional account as a freelancer. Maybe 30 domains is too high in this case.

4. The free account could be removed and a 30 day free trial added to the paid accounts. I guess you either want this or not. The free account doesn't really serve as a sales device like it would on other apps. Also your use of Flaregun doesn't expand over time (like it does with a app like Basecamp). You start with x number of domains to manage, so you jump in at a price point (plan) which allows that number of domains.

I have been thinking about building billing (domain and hosting) into the product, but I guess most people already have an invoicing system setup and wouldn't want another systems. Integration with existing systems would be great but is time consuming and makes the web app a lot more complex.

Cheers,

- Could you suggest a monthly price you would be happy to pay?

- Would you be willing to pay a yearly (saving over the monthly cost) fee? If so what would you be happy paying?

Thanks for your time.