On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 01:04 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

We have a long standing policy of not changing things for existing groups.

Mark
Would this include current pricing for premium groups? As in jump to Premium before the rollback for new groups and the price will be held.  I’m trolling for a reason(s)/benefit(s) to get our group  owner to go Premium (which I believe we should and have lobbied for that. 

On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 08:25 PM, Ken Kloeber wrote:

jump to Premium

I'd rather more people jumped to a premium account than a price rise for existing premium customers.

Andy

On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 06:09 PM, Andy Wedge wrote:

On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 08:25 PM, Ken Kloeber wrote:

jump to Premium

I'd rather more people jumped to a premium account than a price rise for existing premium customers.

Andy
 Well of course  - that’s optimum.  $$trength in numbers.

We did jump. Just now.  

Not “the ship”, of course. 

From day one of my awareness of groups.io. I have been troubled by sustainability of its business model. During my career in software development I saw good products fail when finance directors insisted on charging more than the traffic would bear and used support as a bludgeon to drive dependent customers into line. Eventually, competition offers a better deal and the customers walk. Business models work in the long term when pricing aligns with value-- when the value of what the customer gets from a service aligns with the price they pay. Pay too little and the business goes bankrupt. Charge too much and the customers leave.

The public has gotten used to digital network services, like Google and Facebook, that are ostensibly free to consumers and are sustained by profits generated from the consumer's use of the service, a model that is okay, I guess, but invites exploitation and abuse.

The ostensibly free model has been aided by the dramatic decrease in cost of storage, network bandwidth, and compute cycles from large data centers. The cost decrease has made services like groups.io, which does not generate revenue from their consumers' use of the service, able to offer some free services, but without generating revenue from usage, the free services have to be paid for somehow. Most often, this is done by charging for "premium" services. The revenues from premium services pay for the free services and the free services are an advertisement for premium services.

From a business management standpoint, the challenge in the groups.io type model is to balance the cost of supplying the free service against the value of the advertising in promoting the premium service and the revenues generated by the premium service. This is complicated by the step-wise nature of digital costs. (Supplying a 1000 customers with a digital service often costs the supplier little more than the cost of supplying the first customer.) These factors are not easy to balance. I sympathize with Mark wrestling with this hard problem.

I have one observation: free groups.io services have tremendous value to society in general. As several people have pointed out, groups.io free plan helps many worthwhile causes that could not pay for premium services. As an independent businessperson, Mark is free to charge what he wants to whom he wants. He is not a government agency, a regulated public utility, and he holds no monopoly on email groups. He has no special tax status, he is not even a publicly held corporation. He can, if he wants, within the limits of civil and criminal laws, determine who gets free services based on any criteria he cares to use. I hope he keeps the interests of society at large in mind as he tunes his business model, but that's his business, not mine.
Best, Marv

Marv's ideas are good, thanks for writing them.

I belong to around 15 groups and moderator for 3. These are all
informal groups related to amateur radio and other subjects. Most have
no mechanism for organising payments and no membership fee at all. A
couple are tied to large societies with the own separate membership
rates so making a few (but not many) premium is a possibility. But our
local radio club, similar size to many others in the UK, has just 25
paying members. £200 or so per year for premium is around half what the
membership pays to be a member of the club. Premium is just not going
to happen with that sort of group.

We don't make extensive use of files and photos, but we do, along with
calendar alerts which presumably would also cease with basic.

Your changes are not as simple as they may seem to somebody who only
sees it from a business point of view. At the moment the changes have
not been publicised outside beta, when the rest of your groups hear
about them I doubt they will be happy.

Dave

On 12 Aug 2020 at 9:07, Marv Waschke wrote:

From day one of my awareness of groups.io. I have been troubled by
sustainability of its business model.

http://davesergeant.com

dave wrote:
> ...no mechanism for organising payments and no membership fee at
> all...

Likewise, I'm a member of 4 or 5 groups, none of which are "formal"
clubs, and have no associated dues or payments. All of them are Basic
groups, and are perfectly happy with the services that gives. None of
them use the calendar or the wiki or the database -- just messages, and
modest use of photos, and files, so upgrading to Premium makes no
sense, even if folks might be willing to pay "something".

It's not like these groups don't appreciate that they're getting
something for nothing. I've actually gotten the sense that many
people would be more than happy to help defray Mark's costs, but the
fact is there's no easy way (that I know of) for individuals to make
donations to groups.io itself. Right now someone has to take on the
bill-paying role, and arrange to be reimbursed by the group members.

I think a mechanism that allowed direct "many-to-Mark" payments would
a) encourage voluntary donations, from folks using Basic services, and
b) make the leap from Basic to Premium a lot less daunting for groups
that could make use of the added services, but whose owner(s) might
not want to deal with the fund-raising aspects.

paul
=----------------------
paul fox, pgf@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 86.4 degrees)

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 11:55 AM, Dave Sergeant wrote:

when the rest of your groups hear
about them I doubt they will be happy.

I don't understand why that would be.  Nothing will change on their groups.  A lot of people seem to be skipping over that part.  See https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25916.

In rereading Mark's original message, I don't see anything in there about the price going up for paid groups either.  Hey, if enough groups go premium, it could even go down! ;>)

Duane

I think there has been a lot of miscommunicatio in this thread, starting with Mark's statement that "Basic groups created after that time will be limited to mailing list features only." That's what made me (wrongly) think "yahoo." Because to me, "mailing list features only" does not include, for example, even a message archive. That's the way yahoo went - mailing list only, no web features AT ALL. In the next sentence Mark goes on the list what is NOT included. But nowhere does he state clearly exactly what WILL BE included.

I think instead of describing the new basic groups as "limited to mailing list features only," it would be helpful to list exactly what is meant by "mailing list features." The description doesn't cover all features as included or not included. That would help.
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 10:46 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

All the existing message viewing features will be enabled.

That's an improvement. But I think the list is still not complete. What about message and topic editing features, including editing, merge, split, moderate, lock, etc.?

I think at some point it will be necessary to list all features explicitly and have one of those column checkbox tables where you put a check in the box or not for each feature, for each kind of plan. It may be ok to tell *us* that "If you want to approximate a new basic group, go into group settings, and in the Features panel, turn everything off" but clearly, that won't be sufficient for marketing and is evidently confusing even us old-timers. :)
 
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 12:10 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

That's why I listed the changes in terms of what was being removed, not what was staying. All message/topic editing stuff will still exist. All subscription options will still exist. All archive viewing pages will still exist.

Ok, it's clear now. But a description of what was staying as "mailing list features only" would not normally include a message archive (let alone one loaded with incredible features;), so at that point the list of what was being removed left me confused and seeking a better description.
 
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

Ok, it's clear now. But a description of what was staying as "mailing list features only" would not normally include a message archive

I think that depends on your mailing list. Both Google Groups and mailman provide web message archives.

Best,

Glenn

Oh, ok. When I heard “mailing list only” I thought “yahoo.”

--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

Wow.  I can't believe I have a need for a new group and am now just seeing I just missed this change by 1 day.  I really wish you would have emailed all your group Admins and owners for those of us that don't come to this beta. group site on a regular basis.  This is an important enough change that it seems prudent to make sure that your groups owners knew about it in advance.  

Outside of that frustration, can you give me some guidelines as to how files, photos or attachments will be handled in a new basic (i.e. free) group?  Are they simply not allowed?  Are they retained for a short period of time and then deleted?  I'd like to understand where I can find more about the new basic functionality to ascertain if this is going to work for us.  A premium service is simply something we can't afford on an ongoing basis.  Kind regards, Linda Prain