Some people really don’t like a recent promotion from Cherry, the startup that brings car washes to its users. In a series of tweets which he then aggregated on Storify, Rod Begbie declared that Cherry was made up of “scammy rip-off artists who deserve to die unloved and alone” — and it looks like the company is responding to his criticism.

Begbie’s complaint is with a free carwash promotion that Cherry was offering. Turns out that promotion came with some strings attached — the carwash is indeed free, but people who sign up for it were automatically enrolled in a Cherry membership plan, with recurring payments that automatically start after the trial period. Begbie wrote:

No confirmation email. No banner saying “You’re now in a recurring plan.” This is the kind of bullshit that Zynga never dared pull.

Though their language may not have been as colorful, other commenters on Twitter were also suspicious of Cherry’s tactics.

When asked for an explanation, CEO Travis VanderZanden told us via email, “We’re experimenting with a free trial membership and we now realize that our copy wasn’t obvious enough, so we’re changing the button copy to be more clear.” And indeed, if you go to this page, you can see that the sign-up button now reads “start trial membership” instead of “accept free carwash.” VanderZanden also said that Cherry will be canceling the current trial memberships for anyone who signed up under the old wording.

But why take this approach in the first place? VanderZanden said the company switched to a membership model (plans start at $29 per month) because it was the only cost-effective way to deal with “extremely dirty cars.”

“We either needed to raise prices or keep prices low ($29) with a membership plan which allows us to automatically keep cars clean each month, which takes less time [and] therefore is less expensive for everyone,” he said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Advertisers will soon be able to measure a wider range of actions that consumers take after seeing an ad on Facebook, including comments, shares, app use and Credits spent, according to a spokesperson from the social network.

Previously, it had been difficult for marketers to understand what sort of effect their ads had beyond building a fan base since Facebook did not provide information about what users did after they clicked on an ad. This change seems to be part of a continued push to de-emphasize Likes as a campaign goal, and instead encourage marketers to focus on engagement within the platform. Today’s announcement does not affect Facebook’s pricing model. Ads are still sold on a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression basis.

Based on mock-ups provided by Facebook, advertisers will see a new metric in the ad dashboard called “actions” in place of what had been called “connections.” For example, with a page post ad — those derived from posts a brand made on its fan page — advertisers will now be able to see a breakdown of how many Likes, comments and shares the post received from users who saw the ad (see example below).

Under the old system advertisers could only get data about the number of people who Liked the page as a result of the ad. They could visit a separate page insights dashboard to see the total Likes, comments and shares for a post, but there was no way to distinguish which actions came organically versus through paid media. This latest change helps close that gap and could be particularly useful for Ads API partners that help advertisers optimize their campaigns.

Facebook also tells us that developers will be able to measure and optimize for actions within their apps, including making purchases or any other Open Graph action. Advertisers will define what actions they want to optimize for through the API, and this could later be added to the self-serve tool, similar to what we saw in a beta version that Facebook has been testing.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

It’s been a rough day for Chargify, a service that makes it very easy for startups to incorporate support for subscription payments into their products. Chargify launched a year ago, catering to Web 2.0 and SaaS companies with some attractive pricing, including a free package for companies with fewer than 50 subscribers. But that model isn’t going to work in the long term, so Chargify is making changes — today the company announced a new pricing scheme that ditches its freemium model in favor of one that only offers premium plans, and it’s also doubling the price of its entry-level product from $49 to $99. Users aren’t pleased.

Obviously it’s never good news when a company has to hike its rates, but Chargify’s big stumble lies in the fact that it’s not grandfathering-in current users under the old rates. Some price points are doubling, and free users are now going to have to make the jump to a premium option. Given that many of them likely chose Chargify over its competitors specifically because of this free option, it’s no surprise that Chargify is seeing a substanial backlash.

The Chargify Twitter account has been responding to complaints all day, and the change has sparked a popular thread on Hacker News. Chargify has responded to the negative feedback by announcing the addition of a ‘Bootstrapping’ plan, which runs $39/month for up to 100 customers and will only be available to Chargify users who signed up before today. But anyone relying on a free plan is out of luck, and it’s not trivial to make the jump from one payment system to another.

However, today isn’t all bad news. As part of the price-hike announcement, Chargify also announced that it will be Level 1 PCI Compliant in the next few weeks (which will be a big deal to some businesses) and that it’s offering 24/7 US-based tech support.

Chargify isn’t the only company in this space that’s had to change its pricing model. In March Recurly, which launched with pricing based on per-transaction fees rather than a monthly rate, moved to a flat-rate model. And, as you’d expect, some of its customers weren’t pleased.

Here’s a demo of the product:

Here’s a shot of the old pricing:

And the new pricing:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch