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p/airship-technologies-incLaunch new features the way Facebook and Airbnb do.
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Chris Messina

Airship - Launch new features the way Facebook and Airbnb do

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Top Hunter
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Airship gives everyone the power to roll out new features carefully, instead of blindly hitting deploy. So far, only big companies like Facebook or Airbnb have great tools to do this. Now every company can use Airship to carefully roll out new and features without fear.

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E.T.Cook
I feel like "contact us" pricing is a misguided tactic and a bit disrespectful to potential customers. You don't make it easy for a visitor to fully consider the value proposition you're offering. You're asking visitors to spend their valuable time considering your service but refuse to dignify them with even a broad notion of what the buy in point might be. Are we talking $20 a month? $200? $20,000? Transparent pricing is the hallmark of a company that is confident in their value and understands their market positioning. It's not unusual for companies to have high level plans priced differently if requirements exceed the core plans, but here you actually present multiple plans and demand to be contacted for all of them. There are only two reasons I can think of as to why one would be inclined to hide pricing altogether: 1) Your pricing process is capricious and not a direct "exchange of value." You generate the pricing on a whim depending on who the client is and what you think their budget might be. 2) You aren't yet comfortable value-wise with what you're bringing to the table. The legacy model of hiding pricing is long disfavored. Maybe you intend it as a qualification process - a bit like high end cars: if you have to ask, you're not the right customer. If so, you should probably be more emphatic about your target market. My intention is posting this is constructive feedback, not admonishment. I know I'm not alone in my irritation. With all that said, feature rollout is not new, but it looks like you have a pretty neat interface to segment and visualize the users for rollout. Kudos. Hopefully I'll see a more transparent pricing model soon, so I know whether or not to spend significant energy considering and evaluating your product. Good luck with your release!
Matt
@etc Craziest rant I have ever seen about pricing. ‘Legacy model’...come on man. Vero just launched with no pricing. Sending them an email to inquire about pricing would have taken 1/10th of the time this ridiculous post took
E.T.Cook
@mzuvella It is, by all counts, a legacy model. I'm not sure why you're taking issue with that assertion. A decade ago it might have been common to hide pricing but it's uncommon now. Whenever a service is released without transparent pricing, you'll find complaints. Just look through the comments here. I'm not the only one that found it frustrating. You seem to take issue with the fact that I took the time to provide feedback to the makers. Sorry...I guess? Regardless, you missed the point. This isn't about the time it takes to get the pricing. It's about respecting your visitors by making it easy and efficient to properly evaluate your product. The way you sneer at the notion that a visitor would rather not jump through hoops to evaluate your product borders on contempt. As a "Director of Marketing," you might want to spend more time considering and listening rather than denigrating those that have taken the time to share their experience and feedback. After checking out "FamePick" though, your caustic response makes complete sense in context. You're hyper-defensive because you've chosen the same tactic. Since you practice it first hand, instead of being defensive, maybe you can help rationalize your approach and model. These comment areas provide a fantastic forum for feedback, dialog and discussion. You'd get a lot further trying to engage, rather than publicly insulting others under the banner of the company you represent, especially when they took the time to provide feedback, just like they're now taking the time to dignify you with a proper response. P.S. As I understand it, Vero is providing the product completely free for the first million people. If they're not going to charge you for the service, then there is obviously no need to share what the pricing model might be in the future.
Matt
@etc ‘hyper defensive’ 😂 I run an ad agency...go to Droga5 or Anomalys website and let me know if they have pricing.
E.T.Cook
@mzuvella I don't know if "celebrity endorsement for bid" constitutes an ad agency, but ok. As someone who "runs an ad agency" and "marketer," I'd imagine you're particularly careful about how you present yourself online. I hope public vitriol and insult help establish the veneer and reputation you want associated with your company and online identity.
Jason Jensen
Interesting, but the pricing page contains no actual pricing information beyond the free tier. I am not inclined to start a trial on a service without any idea of what the final pricing might be.
George Li
Maker
@jason_o_jensen Jason, thanks for pointing out that our pricing information could be better! If you have a question regarding pricing, the best way to find out how it works for you is to shoot us an email at hello@airshiphq.com. You can always get started in the free tier!
Joan Mershon
@jason_o_jensen @airshiphq @tewr05 Alternatively, if I have a basic question, such as pricing, and I can't easily find the answer on the website, I simply go away.
Sagiv Ofek
what's the point of having a pricing page that says "contact us"?
Primer
Hi I think this is a good product and some people will find it useful. However I think your marketing lines are over the top and misleading. It's really not that technically challenging these days to roll out new features to a small percentage of your audience and then grow that slice. I've seen this happen at pretty small companies now for years. To anyone looking at this as an option, speak to your dev team first. It's probably achievable with what you have if your infrastructure is already in the cloud.
George Li
Maker
@mickc79 you bring up a fair point about devs being able to roll out a version of this. Often, it may not be in the interest of companies to dedicate engineering resources on an internal tool (dev time + maintenance time + time on new functionalities) when they can focus their resources on their core product or infrastructure.
Primer
@tewr05 ok fair enough but I wasn’t meaning they could build an internal tool. This functionality is baked in to most cloud infrastructure.
Ryan Hoover
Feature flags are the best. We use them at PH for managing beta releases and internal testing.
Kevin Wu

Love the design!

Pros:

Useful for smaller companies to roll out effectively. I can't even count the number if times I've messed something up w/o a tool like this.

Cons:

Not much...still testing it out.

Barron Caster
Very cool, congrats on the launch!
Ben Flowers
Can this work for front end feature flags?
George Li
Maker
@benoj we have a JavaScript SDK in the pipeline! Stay tuned. If you email me at hello@airshiphq.com, we can reach back to you once we do.
Gorkem Cetin
Unfortunately I got a Server Error (500) when I signed up.. Can you recheck?
George Li
Maker
@gorkemcetin Hi Gorken, we just fixed the issue (for non-ascii first name or last name). Also sent you an email. You should be able to sign up now! Thanks!
Ted Cheng
How does the SDK communicate with Airship server? Is latency an issue?
Alvin Yap
Maker
@ted_cheng Not at all! Sending you an email to tell you more.
Nicholas Sheriff
@ted_cheng @alvinyap Yes I would love to know about this as well we use mixpanel and apptimize but it leaves a lot to be desired #1 for us is latency as our product has hundreds of instances every second so 1 second latency impacts a lot of people. info@mathew.cc - would love to talk more I'd jump all over this next week if it works for us.
Phuc Nguyen
I will try it :D
Duarte Martins
Shame I cant try this out with personal projects. I'd need a non-gmail email.
Jack Smith
looks like Launchdarkly, which has been around since 2014. Agree with other people's concerns about not being transparent with at least a RANGE for pricing
ChandraShekhar Ruge

Need to explore more on this....

Pros:

Very nice UX

Cons:

Haven't found one..