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On the 16th of April, the CEO at Ning, Jason Rosenthal announced some major changes at Ning. Cutting the staff with 40% and putting an end to the free Ning product.
Yesterday Ning sent out the new pricing plans being effective from July. Besides sticking to “No more Free Ning”, there are a few other interesting things in the announcement for the now “You need to pay for your Ning network” product.
Ning launches three paid products:
• The cheapest product is called NING MINI and will cost you $2.95/month
• The medium product is called NING PLUS you can get it at $19.95/month
• NING PRO is the prime NING product and will cost you $49.95/month
There are good deals on all three products if you sign on for a year
Now it’s not all bad news…
NING MINI
The free product is now called NING MINI. It’s limited to max 150 members and is probably best suited for family networks, small student groups or a minor customer community platform for small business owners.
But it’s only $19.95 a year, lets say you are a 100 members in the network, then it’s 20 cent a year per member, if a member is not worth that to you – then your time in building the network is certainly not.
NING PLUS
The Medium product NING PLUS is very interesting because it has some new features for the money. Lets say you want your network with the following features ‘Use Your Own Domain’, ‘Remove Create Links’ and ‘Run Your Own Ads’ – that would roughly cost you $55/ today, with the new pricing plan that will cost you $20/month.
I actually find the NING PLUS product very appealing, you are getting control to build your own branded unlimited members network with advanced customization options for less than $200 a year.
NING PRO
The last product NING PRO is a bit more expensive and the gain is kind of in a blur. For about $500 a year you get the same features as with NING PLUS. The extra features are ‘Premium support’ – oh well, add storage and bandwidth plus the API access upgrade when launched. The last part – interesting, but lets wait until its launched.
All in all
In a world where NOTHING is for free, I think Ning actually have a great product and they have launched a product and pricing plan that makes sense. Does that mean we wont hear people complain and curse NING to hell – no of course not – we don’t like to pay for something we’ve gotten for free – even if it’s 20 cents a year.
You can see the announcement and pricing plan from NING here
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