Our Initial Business Model
We initially planned out to monetize on cookies data just like Google or Facebook does. It was simple. Drop cookies in the user’s browser that subscribe to us and then connect them with an ad network. The data will be anonymous and no personal data will be shared. Therefore, everyone wins. For users, they see the ads anyway, just that few of them are being supported through us.
Our plan for the first 3 years was not to change or focus on the revenue. We knew once volume came in, we could pull it off. So we dropped cookies for a while, but then we realized it was an extreme burden on our servers, especially when we were not even utilizing this cookie data. The cookie data vanishes after 2-4 weeks anyway. So kept our focus on acquiring more customers and building good infrastructure so we always have at least double the capacity of our current volumes and we could be the best affordable push notification service in the market.
Over the last 3 years, we have grown from sending 22,000 push notifications/month to sending 35 Billion Push notifications/month (March 2021) and it was tremendous growth. We were growing the fastest in the industry and we believe we have truly innovated a new business model to create values worth tens of thousands of dollars to our customers.
So what changed?
A few months back Google announced that it will stop supporting third-party cookies. The new update directly hit our initial business model of being dependent on cookies. This is something we didn’t expect and left Truepush with two options- either we have to try new methods of making revenue or shut down the company. Shutting down the company meant only one thing- disappointing our 25,000+ loyal customers who helped us grow immensely and letting go of a few of our employees.
Our search for other business models
We were very committed to supporting all our stakeholders as much as possible. Even in the difficult times of the COVID-19 pandemic, Truepush improved its services. However, we were badly hit by the pandemic in ways we can not disclose, and we hardly spoke about it.
If you are our existing customer, you already know how well our system is handling and already sending an average of 1.35Bn Notifications/day(March 2021).
We initially researched push ads and ad networks where our clients can send push notifications on a revenue-sharing basis. But it hardly made sense as a business. The money was too small to distribute to customers and even little money as a company for us to make. We realize it can be one of the minor revenue channels but your and our future cannot be dependent on it. The same reason was valid with running a short ad at an affordable push notification service and it popups within our client’s websites(again we are sure not many websites want to run more ads on their websites for multiple reasons). This is ruled out too.
To have a stable revenue source, we decided to build new paid tools. But the issue with building new tools is it would take time to build. This means it would take a year or more to break even and we are unsure how the market will receive us. We strongly believe, keeping our customers and company at risk at this critical juncture would not make any sense.
Our Conclusion to save and hold all our stakeholders and a new future.
We finally decided to charge our customers. And, we made it a priority that it should not affect our customers with heavy charges, unlike our competitors whose plans are overpriced.
While our motto as a business is to be profitable, we realized we will not charge a premium price from our customers. And, keeping everything in perspective of whether to live or die as a company, we decided we will live and thrive while supporting customers like you. To do this, we are changing our motto from Free Forever to the Most Affordable push notification Service in the world.
This way, our customers pay way less than any other push notifications platform provided in the world. This will help us just enough to recover our server costs and keep us going forward without thinking about the future or survival.
So we decided we would give –
Free tier up to 1 Lakh subscribers and charge only a minimum price of $60 for the next 1 Lakh subscribers/month/website from then on. Both Free and paid tier users can use all the features. Also, note that the pricing is per website and not per account as most of our competitors do. They combine all website subscribers and you will end up paying a lot.
If you find a more affordable plan anywhere else with the same features, write to us (help@truepush.com) and we will try to slash our prices less than them. We only hope that you will be with us while we make this transition. Together, we will make our markets and the world a better place.
Keep pushing!
Team Truepush