Public Launch, Pricing Plans and Slush

The last few weeks have been quite hectic here at CrankWheel HQ. Two things kept us busy: Making our product generally available on our website on Friday, November 6th, and preparing for the Slush conference in Helsinki, which happened last week, November 11th and 12th. Our plan was to launch just before Slush, and then publicize our launch at the conference, as well as meet with prospective customers in Finland during our trip.

As anyone who has crammed for a test knows, hard deadlines can be a fantastic tool to make forward progress, but they can also occasionally blow up in your face.

In our case, I’m happy to report that our hard deadline turned out to be the good kind. We ate a few more pizzas (the magical breakfast/lunch/dinner food) and drank a bit more coffee than we normally do, and maybe we skipped going to the gym a couple of times, but in the end everything came together before the big date.

We launched a revamped web site designed by our friends at Drakkar on November 6th, where anyone on the Internet can now start using the CrankWheel product. Our launch introduced the individual plan, which provides CrankWheel free of charge for individual use, personal or commercial.

We also launched the ability for customers to sign up to our subscription plans for teams and organizations using only a credit card, where before we had manually onboarded our first paying customers (we are currently at 9, and counting). Paid plans get a separate lobby that your customers enter when joining a session, user management for your organization, co-branding, priority support, and access to premium enterprise features such as white labeling.

Our pricing is based primarily on usage, not on the number of users. Our goal is always that every employee of your company should have access to CrankWheel, as we recognize that while there will be a core group of users who use the product actively, there is a lot of value in all of the rest having access to it even if they use it only occasionally. Rather than force you to make a tough decision on how many user licenses to buy, and rather than try to lock you into a 12 month contract as many SaaS businesses do, we would much rather partner with each of our customers to build value for the long run. We believe in our product and we want to let it prove its worth within your organization.

If you don’t see a plan that fits your needs, please contact sales@crankwheel.com, as we will very happily customize plans for prospective customers.

The Slush conference in Helsinki was a blast. We had a demo booth on Thursday, and we don’t think we stopped doing live demos for even one whole minute from 9 AM to 6 PM. There was a tremendous amount of interest and action, and at the end of the day, we were so tired that we considered skipping the legendary Slush afterparty, but only for a brief moment.

We’ll leave you with some pictures from Slush. Here’s hoping you have as much fun using CrankWheel as we always do demonstrating it to prospective customers! You can start using it right now, for free, at www.crankwheel.com.