Posts Tagged ‘currency’

Print-Bingo.com Pricing Change

Saturday, January 1st, 2011

Happy New Year!

We’ve hinted at this for years, and we’re finally doing it today. Print-Bingo.com Premium Access account upgrades are now $12, but we are also  officially increasing the access term by 50% to 3 years. Previously, it was $10 for a 2 year term.  The 2 years expiry was never enforced, and we currently have no plans to enforce the 3 year expiry.

A few thoughts on our pricing and term length change.

The price has never changed since print-bingo.com was launched in 2005. If we estimate an average inflation of 2% per year, we have lost 10% of our revenue after adjusting for inflation.  Further, as a Canadian firm, where our operating expenses and salaries are paid out in Canadian funds, we’ve had a large hit from the rise in the Canadian Dollar over  the US Dollar – but that’s a problem for all Canadian exporters, not just us *.

 

On the feature side, when print-bingo.com was originally launched, an upgrade gave you the following feature(s):

 

  • The ability to print up to 200 pages per run of standard numeric bingo cards.

Yes, that’s really it.

We did not have customizable bingo cards, design saving features, draw chips, randomized draw lists, or serial number features initially.  These were all added over time as the user base of the site grew.

Today, an upgrade to print-bingo.com will get you the following feature(s):

 

  • The ability to print up to 1000 pages per run of standard numeric cards, or the customizable word bingo cards
  • Generate and print randomized Bingo calling cards to quickly call your game.
  • Generate and print calling chips for drawing your terms from a hat or box.
  • Generate bingo cards with serial numbers to help you ensure that cards have been generated by you.
  • Keep your saved or emailed Bingo card designs indefinitely (vs. 30 days for guest users).

I think that we offer much better value now than we did a few years ago.

About the 2 year versus 3 year terms.  When print-bingo.com launched, we had no idea if it would be worth our while to run this site indefinitely. So, we picked a length of time that we were sure that we could promise our users.   Now that our site is well established, we’re pretty confident that we can increase our guaranteed length of access  by 50% to 3 years – even this is probably conservative.

* For the curious, our first sale was on 2005-08-10 at 13:55, at that time,  USD 1 =  CAD 1.214.  At the time of writing (late December 2010), USD 1 = CAD 1.00644 .

 

PayPal Changes it’s Canadian Pricing

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

I read some good news for small businesses in Canada who use PayPal to receive credit card payments.  The transaction costs have dropped by $0.25.  I’m happy, especially since our print-bingo.com transactions upgrade price for Premium access price is currently $10 so percentage wise, the extra $0.25 has a noticeable benefit on our margins. *

The percentage that PayPal takes also drops if you’ve gone past the 3000 per month bracket.

In my humble opinion, PayPal is now an even better deal for small scale web sites. The threshold where I would spend the time and money to move to a merchant account with a bank just got bumped up by a lot.  I’ve helped set up a “proper” merchant account for a client in the past, and it’s not fun nor cheap.  And programming for PayPal is really nice in comparison.

Also note that the entry level currency conversion for Canadians at 2.5% still stinks.

At Perceptus, we use a US based USD chequing account through RBC Centura where we withdraw our funds in USD.  Then we either convert to CAD with the somewhat better bank exchange rate, or we pay Leonard in USD to avoid exchange costs altogether.

The PayPal blog post is here: http://www.thepaypalblog.com/weblog/2008/06/lowered-fees-fo.html

* Hmm… what’s with that emphasis on the word “currently”?