There’s nothing quite like an honest perspective; and I’m with you - you have to honor your your principles.

That said, I want you to know where we are coming from with this offering. The way it works when someone orders a customized login page is they send us to a web page they want copied. Whether you email us a file or send us a link, it does not matter much to us because neither one saves us much time.

Once we have the file, the work begins. What work? We review the HTML, we review and download all the image files. Then we upload the image files to our servers and we further audit the HTML that’s been sent (security). After it looks okay, we put our source code inside (ie the login box) and around your code (headers footers, etc). Note this is now a stand alone page on our servers that is unique to you and can’t be altered the way we can with our standard login pages from a single file.

So…as you can see there is human overhead to review, upload and integrate your page…let’s call that one hour of our developers time. Then we send you a note to makes sure it’s okay and ready for prime time - call the communication and further edits .5 hours. So, 1.5 hours of people time. The next consideration is, “what happens if you change a link in your navigation and need it reflected in your customized login page?” The answer is, we make changes like that at no charge. So between some new emails and opening your file and getting sign off, let’s call it 2 hours.

Then there is that overhead of maintaining these pages from a technology stand point. Ideally we would not offer this service - it makes us less nimble. But we started it a long time ago, so we continue. The consequence? To edit our standard login pages we need to now account for customized login pages. To edit our directory structures, we need to take these pages into account. As you can imagine, the list goes on. What’s the cost? Days of dev time spread out across many pages. No doubt a non-trivial cost per page.

Anyway…all I am trying to demonstrate here is that there is cost to us for these pages…at least 1.5 hours of dev time…at $80/hour…that’s $120, not including indirect costs listed above (directories, etc) or changes to your page if you need them, or the opportunity costs of spending our time in this way, and it’s important that we don’t lose money on these pages because, well, that’s not the point of them.

So…in a nutshell, we perhaps should offer a more technological answer to this problem, but it’s a legacy service and more likely than not we’re going to just kill it off. With that said, we’re the only people who offer something like this. You don’t need to order it, but for those who want it they appreciate the offer and the value of it so they purchase. For those people, our decision to remove the service [it gets more likely when we read posts like this ;) ] is sub-optimal as they may not possess your design and development skills and therefore not look at the cost the way you do.

That’s a long winded way of saying, I hope you understand our take on this a little better now and in that understanding you become a little more sympathetic to our position on the pricing of the service.

I welcome you to drop me a note (I looked for your phone number, but could not find it) to discuss this in further detail and I would be happy to try to work something out that works for you in hopes we can overcome this stumbling block and as a way of saying we value your feedback.

- mike

Mike McDerment
CEO FreshBooks.com
416.481.6946, ext 222
http://freshbooks.com/team/mike

1) People time

- people time
- no one offers this
- management time
- tweaks and changes (navigation, etc)

I fully agree. There is no reason why this needed to be a $270 fee. There are about 10 other projects, services, and tools I have tried to use that were the same way.

Btw I noticed you do not have comments link in the feed and I just wrote how to easily put extra stuff to your feed - thought it could be useful http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/smart-ways-to-enhance-your-blogs-rss-feed

Bull crap…

That guys link building guide sets off so many red flags it sounds like it was literally ripped from some guru’s eBook

For example in 30 days he says he creates 100 pages of content (and in other parts of the site he insists his secret is quality content) and then gathers a link to each page… All within 30 days.. He then proceeds to leave those 100 link types open ended since his next step after doing all this is to start getting directory links and the next step after that is 3 way link exchanges. So if those 100 links to your subpages don’t fall into either of those categories what are they? Even using a fast link request service like link metro it would be next to impossible since it usually takes a few days to get a link accepted and then you have to switch it to another target page..

At best it’s a poorly written out plan and at worst it’s utter rubbish… Even if I’m wrong and it’s all true maybe .001% of people who try it could ever pull that off..

After writing the above post I actually did some reading on the subject and the general consensus out their is testimonials with contact info like website url have at least twice the punch as a pure text testimonial at least when it comes to driving conversions…

And yet even after you have the testimonial for your site, think of the resounding benefits - if someone who is already in the field likes your product, what is the likelihood that they’ll tell other people in their working circle about the product? I’d say it’s pretty high. Suddenly, you have several inroads for your product DIRECTLY into your target audience - and all you had to do was ask someone nicely for a review. :D

Never said anything about you posting reviews…

Ahh well I guess now I can write up that thoughtful post on toe cheese…