Facebook Fan Page Creator Creates Hostages, No?

It's not 24.95 + $47. It's 24.95 + 17 =$41.95/mo. and that's for unlimited use to make pages for your clients. Now I have servers I pay more for and all you have to do is charge a small monthly fee to cover the costs. The modules allow you to do that and I've already done this successfully. I look at it like hosting, it's a cost of doing business and if you look around at other services you can't touch an unbranded unlimited solution for this price.

5mfp is more than 50% less for unlimited non branded version

yes I will

also received your pm. i'll let you know when the start selling it

cheetr: yes it is a rebranded Lujure app which is awesome because I can now build fan pages for clients for much less than going through lujure. Not sure how they did it but I'm happy. It's very easy to turn a profit because it takes much less time now to create a page. Design your background, drop your video and optin code, add some hotspots and publish. Rather than, Design the page, code the page, host the page then create the iframe app in fb then paste the code in the iframe app. It's quick easy and now affordable. Email brian he'll get back to you and fix the developer issue like he did for me. I really don't think he expected this thing to take off like it did so I'm sure he's in email hell right now. He's got some things to work out with Lujure but once he does it's going to be smooth sailing. Now to mention the updated lessons and graphics he's adding.

(NOTE: The explanation of this transplanted dialogue is at the top of the very first post in this thread prefaced by the word, "UPDATE")

Alex Bernstein
North Social

Hi Eric,

I saw your blog post on Warrior Forum via a Google alert. Looked like you have to pay to comment which I'm probably not a candidate for.... wanted to drop you a response anyway...

I think you are missing a big part of what goes into fan page apps, which a few of the blog comments pointed out, but I wanted to give you my two cents as one of the companies you mentioned in the same word as "hostage". Not exactly the term we use to describe our users. Developing the app is the easy part, ongoing support over time is where the real costs pile up. I'll explain why we charge ongoing fees to support North Social apps AND why companies that don't aren't going to be in business for long.

1. Hosting.

apps, images, content, etc all have to be hosted somewhere. (iFrames don't run themselves) there has to be a highly available server running somewhere in order to show the content and enable the apps to function. That server needs electricity ($) and bandwidth ($) and it's probably inside a building ($ rent), as well as monitored by a sys admin ($) and likely backed up somewhere (more $).

If a guy says he'll host your content until the end of time for a one time fee of $20....you ought to laugh out loud and look for someone who is actually running a real business that will be around in 6 months.

If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

Real hosting costs money. Real data centers cost money. Good employees cost money. We've got two geo-redundant tier 4 rated data centers running 24/7 and our hosting and bandwidth costs alone exceed some of our competitors annual revenues. That said, we are one of the lowest cost providers who is clearly "real". We're part of a 650 employee public company (Vocus) with over $100M in revenue and over $100M in cash. We're not going away anytime soon.

Sure some start up with 100 users can run off a server in their garage and charge $10...UNTIL they hit real traffic, then they need to get "real". (scalable cloud, real bandwidth, hosting, data centers, staff, etc.) Even with Amazon EC2 or S3 the costs at scale are tens of thousands of dollars per month when they get to our size.

If a low cost app provider plans on selling a one time fee FB app and doesn't account for the ongoing hosting expense they will go out of business, or their apps will crash and burn the next time FB pushes a big update.

2. Support

Support has two flavors and both cost money. Customer support (which app providers should offer) comes in the form of live humans who answer support tickets and phone calls and do it yourself forums.

DIY forum support usually only covers the more technical folks... marketing staff like to talk to people and work through issues on the phone or via chat/email. At North Social we have a super nice support team of power users who we pay full salary and benefits to help thousands of users every single day. We create good jobs right here in the good old USA.

Technical support... this is a big one. Facebook changes everything constantly. This means we (app providers) have to update, upgrade, re-build, and bug fix apps constantly.

If your app provider has no ongoing budget to support their apps, the apps will eventually break and they'll have no staff to fix it.

There are millions of broken and abandoned apps on FB, the creation cost is dwarfed by the cost of ongoing technical upgrades/support of the code.
We've got an awesome dedicated development team and will be releasing new apps throughout the summer. We're heading towards 40+ apps for one monthly fee. (All new apps are instantly made available for existing users) We pay our team well, again more jobs.

3. Terms of use.

Why is there a term that says if your content is deleted by mistake, you can't sue for a gazillion dollars?

This clause (which is extremely common) is the only way a hosting provider can survive without having the risk of data loss resulting in a $500M lawsuit over a missing Facebook fan page.

So, while we work our ass off to ensure zero data loss AND have massive backup systems and redundant servers, we can't be on the hook for uncapped damages. We're not Iron Mountain and if we were (triple tape backups) we'd have to triple our costs, which doesn't make sense.
We aren't preying upon the foolish.

We aren't running a scam.

We are well aware of how to run a highly competitive business in a free market and be successful.

We get emails every day from users who try to explain that we don't know how to do XYZ, and that we're terrible at ABC, or that we suck in hundreds of different ways. We also have over 90,000 apps installed and are powering tens of thousands of fan pages 24/7 on a global basis.
We're pretty seasoned investors/executives with a 15+ year track record of launching successful companies. There isn't a big "secret" to what we do, nor is there some short cut opportunity to create a business that would slash our fixed costs and allow our prices to be undercut by someone "smarter" than us.

We aren't sitting on gold chairs making piles of cash. We do well, but we also have a big office full of smiling faces to keep running. Note: We run extremely lean. No coffee machine lean.

I'm extremely confident that any FB app provider who tries to undercut us on price will fool themselves into thinking that there is a low priced market that you can sustain on the operations end. They will eventually go out of business, or their apps will fail.

Most of those who are trying have never run a real business before and are living at home, or are using FB apps to try and sell something else. That's the real bait and switch that users ought to be aware of. If a company is providing free apps, what else are they going to sell me (with high margin) so that they can sustain their app business.

Anyway, I get worked up when people look at our business model and assume that there is some "catch" or that we aren't providing value for our fees. There are thousands of business owners who are thrilled with the results they get from our apps, and more than happy to pay $20 a month for the tools that help them close enough new business that makes the cost irrelevant.

We bust our ass to provide value and our support ticket rate is under 1% of users. We like to think that means 99% of our users are happy.

Yep, we aren't perfect, but we're working hard to get as close as we can.
Cheers,
Alex
(edit: a little personal stuff removed)
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Alex Bernstein

Warrior looks like a great forum.

One thing that should be added...

We do not hold user data hostage. Ever.

Most apps are powered by images. The user owns the images and they upload them and manage them themselves. This isn't expensive website code that costs tons of money to create, the images are typically used for a few weeks for a seasonal promotion and changed. Some users change them every day.

If a North Social user wants to take their artwork and use a different app provider they can cancel anytime and use a different app provider. They own the creative assets 100%.

In fact, that's why we don't guarantee lifetime storage of the creative assets. If both our data centers exploded, we'd lose data. We'd be back online in a few days from backups, but they might have to re-upload their art which takes about 3 minutes.

Anyway, I get the whole "hostage" thought, but I don't see how it really applies to us...

Now, some of our competitors DO have annual exclusive contracts (Like Involver who charges $999 a month for a similar offering as ours) and other providers that co-own (steal) the customer data from sweepstakes and contest entrants (Wildfire who charges $150/month PER APP and will "co-own" the user data).

Their offenses are not our defense, we actually operate in a completely different way, I'm just agreeing that some players in this space aren't as open and willing to let users leave unharmed.

We are a month to month service and users can cancel at anytime, all users can take your data and leave without any issues at any time you want.

The term "hostage" just isn't accurate with how we operate.

We don't price on a data usage model only to simplify the process for end users, not to create margin. It's just a balance of all other costs. BTW, $7/month hosting providers rarely answer the phone or spend millions on developing new apps and tools for their users which are included. Most have shopping cart experiences that try to sell 200 other products so they can actually make money on their cheap web hosting (loss leader).

Another thing worth mentioning is that most pages rotate different tabs on and off their page on a promotional schedule. They often use our services sometimes for only 30 or 60 days and then end the promotion. That's fine, we're set up perfectly for that. Nobody has every complained a single time about leaving our platform and that somehow they felt that they were getting a raw deal. It's not a smoking gun, the door is wide open.

So, again, we're not a life support system, we're an additional feature that can enhance a fan page, but certainly not something that is required, or would we in any way cause a dependency that would adversely affect a business. The page exists fine without our apps and many of our users run multiple apps from multiple providers all the time.

On a last note...If an "entrepreneur" doesn't have $20 then chances are pretty good that they don't have the skills to create revenue/income and might be better served looking into other hobbies. Harsh, I know... but it's true.

(edit: a personal statement removed)
Cheers,
Alex
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Alex Bernstein

Makes sense.

Hopefully both novice and experienced marketers will realize that FB Pages can and do still work really well with just a plain old Facebook powered wall. Content is king and good writers, posters, and brands can make amazing things happen on Facebook without apps.

The good news is that we are releasing more and more apps under the same cost structure. So while there may be slight arbitrage on the hosting front for $20, we make up for it with innovation and new apps that enable new fun stuff.

I also get the art of eye catching headlines. We use em all the time too. No hurt feelings, I promise.

The thing that gets my attention is when companies who offer hosted iFrames for a "low one time fee" are compared to those that charge monthly and the commentary paints the SAAS model out as something "bad" for users.

The concept that the people who promise lifetime hosting for a one time fee are somehow more "honest" baffles me. In reality they are taking a gigantic risk by creating a business that looks more like a ponzi scheme where new buyers fund the hosting of the previous buyers. If new sales falter, then the whole thing falls apart and everyone loses. Bernie Madoff style business.

Thanks for all the feedback, we'll keep pushing along and doing our best to help educate users, build more apps, and keep up with the constant stream of changes Facebook throws at us.

Cheers,
Alex
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Yes...

I've got easy to follow video tutorials for everything.