We’ve been very lax about enforcing the page view limits of whatever account you have signed up for. For the most part this hasn’t been a big deal, but as we continue to grow past 300,000 monitored sites and attract bigger customers to Clicky, it has become a serious problem.
When you go to the upgrade page, it won’t let you sign up for a plan that doesn’t have at least as many page views as you are currently logging on average. That’s all well and good, but the problem typically occurs after the upgrade. Here are the two most common patterns that we see:
- High traffic site signs up for Clicky and pays for an upgrade almost immediately. Say this site has 300,000 daily page views, but if they’ve only been tracking for an hour, they probably only have 10-20,000 page views logged so far. The upgrade page would let them sign up for Pro (30,000 daily page view limit) at this point, even though they’re going to be logging 10x as much traffic. We could extrapolate their traffic so far to get an estimate, but some sites have very strange traffic patterns so there’s no way we could make this reliable.
- User pays for an account and is within the limits of that account. As the years go by and their traffic grows, however, they are eventually well beyond the limits they are paying for.
Clicky is an expensive operation to run, but we still manage to have the best pricing in the industry (excluding free services of course). For example, in terms of the features offered and the mix of real time and historical data, Woopra is arguably our closest competitor. If you had a site with 30,000 daily page views, you could monitor that on Clicky with our Pro package, which costs $10/month or $60/year. With Woopra, you’d need their “Platinum” package to monitor that many page views, and the price for that is $50/month or $500/year.
With pricing this good, we can no longer allow the above scenarios to occur. So starting this week, we’re going to enforce what you are paying for.
Here’s how it’s going to work. Clicky’s pricing is based on daily page views, but we’ll be doing this based on total monthly volume. If you have a Pro account, those 30,000 daily page views will be seen as 900,000 monthly. We’re going to allow a 20% buffer, which means Pro will be allowed an additional 180,000 page views for the month (1,080,000 total).
For a Pro account, once you hit 900,000 for any given month, you’ll get an automated email from us about exceeding your limits, and you’ll see messages in the Clicky interface about this too. But once you are over the 20% buffer, tracking for your sites will be disabled until the end of the month, unless you upgrade to a plan that supports your traffic levels. You’ll get an email when that happens, and you’ll see messages in our interface about it too.
We hate to have to do this, but to keep our pricing as reasonable as it is, we need those of you using a lot of resources on our end to pay for what you are using. To be fair, most of you are well within your limits, and we appreciate that greatly. But for the people who are over their limits, they are generally well beyond them, in the 5-10x range. That’s a problem!
Update: As of March 9, this is live.
