A Suggestion for Astrodienst

Posted by Chris Brennan on Sunday, October 5 20085 Comments

I wrote a suggestion to the Astrodienst team at www.astro.com on their forum today about offering registered users the option of paying for additional chart space once they hit the 100 chart limit. What follows is the suggestion I posted on their forum. If you agree with the suggestion then you should stop by that thread on the forum and express your support. Otherwise post a comment on this article and let me know what you think about the proposal, whether you agree or disagree. Here is the proposal:

I have a suggestion for the main website. A few weeks ago a number of people from the Association for Young Astrologers were at a conference and we were discussing what an important resource astro.com is for newer astrologers, and how everyone uses your free chart calculation service quite a bit until they are eventually forced to buy other chart calculation software. Eventually the issue of the 100 chart limit for registered users came up, and some people stated how they would often either have to delete certain charts in their list or register another account in order to cast more charts.

I have a suggestion for Astrodienst which would be mutually beneficial for both your company and for the astrological community itself. Here it is: for registered users they should have an option to buy more space in order to store additional charts once they reach the 100 chart limit. How you structure it would be up to you – for example it could be a one time fee, or an annual fee like the personal daily horoscope (I favor the former) – but the idea is that users are given the option of paying a small fee in order to store more than 100 charts in their account.

Since people are already apparently creating multiple accounts in order to store additional charts, or having to delete charts altogether, this would be a wining situation for Astrodienst, since many of these people would probably much rather prefer to just pay a fee in order to store additional charts rather than having to start separate accounts in order to circumvent the limit.

Not only would this help to bring additional revenue in to Astrodienst, but it would also make it so that astrologers would continue to use your chart calculation service for much longer, since for some people the only reason that they end up having to buy chart calculation software is simply so that they can store more than 100 charts.

This would definitely help to bring more revenue in to Astrodienst, but it would also be a very useful service for many astrologers who rely on your chart calculation service in order to cast every chart that they look at. For me personally, the only reason that I eventually bought chart calculation software is because I was tired of having to delete chart data in order to stay within the 100 chart limit on astro.com, so I know that I certainly would have paid for such a service if it had been available a few years ago.

I submit this suggestion to you in the interests of helping to continue to grow your business, as well as in the interests of the many generations of astrologers who are just getting started in astrology and who rely on your website for virtually everything. I call them the ‘astro.com generation’.

Keep up the good work!

Best regards,
Chris Brennan.

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5 Comments »

whall said:

oh wow – I suggested this more than a year ago! I’m of the same mind – astro.com can make a great business doing a managed service for astrologers. Everything goes managed service eventually – email, contact management, documents, social media, blogging… nothing is immune.

If astro.com doesn’t do it, someone else will. Who do you know would pay a yearly subscription to astrolabe or solarfire instead of purchasing it outright? Most, I bet. People can afford $50-100 a year much more easily than > $500 one-time fee.

Updates, new features, added social items like comments, embedding, rss feeds, etc… all that is enabled with a managed service vs a paid software license. You can even tier it out as free, basic, pro, elite… just like every other service out there.

SaaS – they should look it up and adhere to the coming efficiencies gained by employing Software as a Service.

I will comment on the thread.

- October 7 2008 at 11:26 pm

Chris Brennan (author) said:

Exactly! We are in complete agreement here. Personally I would like to see Astrodienst retain its corner on the market by continuing to expand into these new fields, since they are such a great company and I owe them a great deal of gratitude. I understand that overhauling the entire system may not be feasible at the moment though. I guess that we will have to keep our fingers crossed.

- October 8 2008 at 10:01 pm

Alois said:

Hi Chris, found this when I googled for Astrodienst Forum, because sometimes we like to know what is said about us outside of the own site.

We actually have done it, since about two weeks there is the option to subscribe to a 1000 chart limit.

I have taken the liberty to activate a free one in your account.

- November 9 2008 at 2:50 am

Chris Brennan (author) said:

That’s great! Thank you so much Alois! I hope to see Astrodienst grow and thrive for many more years to come!

- November 11 2008 at 10:02 am

Astro.com Unveils Two New Services | The Horoscopic Astrology Blog said:

[...] two new services/projects on their website, http://www.astro.com. The first new thing is that they took my suggestion from a few weeks ago and started offering an option on their site to store more chart files for registered users. For [...]

- November 17 2008 at 5:42 am

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