Is the price right?

July 8th, 2008 by Andrew Jenks

Come on down!

At Discovery Mining we receive a lot of feedback about pricing from customers and potential customers. Even in our London office, they require parity with US pricing, but we are always competitive. There has recently been talk about the cost of filtering data and paying for “data you don’t need”. I did a post in May about the cost of processing and my philosophy about the “true” cost of processing data. As we know, there is a cost to doing business. However, one should ask, “Where do you recoup that baseline price so that you’re not out of business in a few months?” Google™ gives away so much free stuff that they are now going to charge their employees above market rate for childcare.

As I’ve said over and over, Discovery Mining focuses its pricing on the value it ADDS to the process. Our free TIFF imaging is a good example of that. The market, at least at LegalTech West Coast, seems to be saying “processing data we don’t need isn’t a value add”. While I do agree with this in principle, it takes a tremendous amount of CPU cycles to pre-process data. Typically, our pricing involves a small fee to process (cull, de-dupe, text extraction, search, upload data preparation) and another fee to upload data to our system. Getting back to our philosophy, we charge where the value lies and we think we’ve got a great answer.

In anticipation of a MAJOR feature release we are working on, we’ve decided to be preemptive and offer the related new pricing to the market now. While there is a marginal value to pre-processing data, our value-add is getting data online fast and making review easier. With this in mind we’ve decided to drop the price for pre-processing data and only charge upload, sub $1000, for data that makes it through the criteria. Now at Discovery Mining we have only three basic charges: Uploading, Monthly Hosting, and Loadfile Creation fees.

The nice thing about designing our own software is the flexibility in feature releases and the ability to tie our business costs to price points. This allows us to meet market demand while still keeping the lights on. Enjoy our new pricing and stay tuned for new features which will demonstrate why and how we’re staying with our core pricing philosophy.

Posted in pricing, Law Firm, Vendor


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