Subscription Services - Contract or No Contract?

When setting up the subscription packages for The Marketplace, we considered a number of aspects. Some were deemed more important than others based on feedback from clients and the clients of similar services. Two key elements that were discussed in detail, were cost, and subscription length. Let’s take a look at price/cost. When we looked at similar services, although let’s face it, nothing matches The Marketplace for the level of information and business leads available, it was scary how much these organisations were charging clients. The Marketplace has been designed to cater for almost all organisations, regardless of sector or profession, size or turnover. We spoke to a lot of organisations who liked the idea of a much larger pipeline of potential clients but simply can’t justify thousands of pounds in subscription fees. That’s why we decided the highest cost subscription to all of our UK wide services (Tenders, Planning, Grants) would only cost the price of a coffee a day. Minimum Subscription. Another great area of discussion was the length of the contract, and in fact, should we even have one? Talking to people with experience of our types of services, it was clear that so many had got into legal disputes with the service providers when trying to cancel their subscriptions. This left a “bad taste” in their mouths with many of them telling us they wouldn’t subscribe to similar services again. Couple this with the cost and we had a serious barrier to obtaining customers if we were to operate a similar model! We, therefore, decided two things here. The first thing was to make sure the cost was kept as low as possible to ensure cost was not a barrier to even the smallest businesses, and the second thing was to have NO MINIMUM CONTRACT. It’s a bit like easy in, east out. You can even subscribe for 1 month and then leave. Of course, once clients see the high value of the information we provide, they don’t leave. At the time of writing, not one client has left the Marketplace since subscribing.