Updates about Pricing, New features, and more.

Use coupon codes YEARLYPACK and MONTHLYPACK during checkout to get 10%(first year) and 50%(first month) off respectively.

The last few days have been exciting as people have started to use Blanq to shorten, customize, and track links on a daily basis. We now have more than 30 users signed up and about 500 links created on the platform. These links have generated about 10000 redirects up until now. While these numbers appear to be small, they keep growing. It has been only a month since I launched so, I am quite happy with these results.

The early users have provided me an opportunity to fix bugs and improve and polish some of the features. The platform is quite stable now and I do not see any outstanding issues. But at the same time, a lot can be improved – the documentation, addition of new features like UTM builder and in-app details like displaying the date, ability to sort, etc.

Costs

With growth comes the cost to maintain the system. Here’s the breakdown of total costs every month right now:

• Hosting on Digital Ocean: $ 20 per month
• Hosting of Official blog on Namecheap: $ 12 per month

So in total: $32 per month which is kind of okay for now.

Ideally, I would love to use some of the paid tools to effectively manage day-to-day operations. Here’s the list:

• Rollbar – $1 per month
• Migadu for mail – $4 per month
• Digital ocean managed Mysql database – $ 15 per month
• Digital ocean Load balancer – $10 per month
• Additional host from Digital ocean – $ 15 per month
• Digital ocean Spaces – $ 5 per month

So, this would mean an additional expense of $ 50 per month besides the current $ 32 per month that I pay right now bringing a total of $ 82 to grow and maintain the application.

These are just technical tools and I have not even considered marketing and admin tools that I would need to pay in the near future.

Pricing Changes

When I started Blanq, I did not really pay attention to the pricing or the plans but, with the projected growth that I expect, running the application without covering the monthly costs is detrimental to very the people using it every day.

Keeping this in mind, I have made some changes to the structure of plans and updated their prices.

The good news is that I won’t kill the Free plan. In fact, it gets better. You can now have up to 5 custom domains and can soon have a UTM builder right within the app. The new limitations for the free plan are – Total links limited to 50 and Click tracks limited to 5000 per month which I think is good enough for small use cases.

There are now 2 new paid plans for people looking to get more value from Blanq.

• Starter plan – $ 19 per month
• Standard plan – $ 49 per month

The detailed information about these plans is at https://blanq.io/pricing.html

These new plans are cheaper than the competition and yet have similar features. Going forward, you will notice more focus and emphasis on building interesting features for these paid plans.

The revenue generated from sales will entirely be invested back into building the platform which will allow it to be more resilient, reliable, and be a sustainable business for a very long time.

Use coupon codes YEARLYPACK and MONTHLYPACK during checkout to get 10%(first year) and 50%(first month) off respectively.

Head to https://blanq.io now!