🚀 The new FollowUpThen is now available in open beta. Billing limits have gone into effect. To migrate your account, log in with your existing username and password at app.followupthen.com. Feedback is welcome!
In the past few months, we've completed hundreds of refinements and bug fixes. These include performance improvements, pricing refinements, design changes, documentation and more. We also have been on a mission to enhance the best part of FollowUpThen – its simplicity.
Simplified Pricing
Our new pricing reflects the simplicity of the new FollowUpThen. No more feature grids and plan levels. Now it's just this:
- One base plan. Unlimited followups. All essential skills.
- Minimal free version with limits.
- Optional premium Skills – like an app store for FUT.
This pricing seems like a natural fit, but getting to this level of simplicity was hard. It required clarifying soul-searching, starting over (a few times!) and rediscovering the central-most concept of FollowUpThen: The fact that we want to play the role of a personal assistant more than a "tool".
Charging for a personal assistant is different than charging for the use of a tool. Tools are used. Personal assistants are employed. They are trained, they acquire skills and become more valuable.
Thank you to the many users who took the time to have meaningful discussions about FollowUpThen and what it means to their workflow. This qualitative feedback was indispensable.
When you migrate to our new version, you will be placed on a plan with comparable features. Sorting out the migration for (dozens!) of legacy package plan / plan states was no small feat, but the task is now complete and ready for you to come on board.
Team Pricing
Our team billing fits perfectly with our new pricing. A team owner can hire an affordable personal followup assistant for everyone on their team for only $4/mo (billed annually). In addition, the team owner can assign individual team member budgets – with each team member having a different budget. This gives team members the freedom to add skills unique to their workflows while controlling overall team costs. More about team plans.
Changes to Free Plan
We will be limiting the functionality of our free plan in the coming months. This is being done to improve our focus on business productivity, encourage people to move to our new base plan, and simplify FollowUpThen for new users.
These features are now only available in our new base plan. They will no longer be in the free plan:
- Recurring reminders
- Tasks (-t)
- Cancellation (-c)
- Email-based actions
We have also changed to count active followups, instead of newly scheduled followups per month.
Why the changes? In short, simplicity. Removing features from the free plan makes the product simpler to use and simpler to maintain. Free accounts with zombie reminders (mindlessly emailing inboxes that are never checked) and rarely used features introduced complexity – taking from the time that could be spent making a better product, one that is worth paying for.
Pricing Per Connected Inbox
Connecting to your inbox directly to FollowUpThen enables advanced functionality such as response detection. It is also one of the most labor-intensive parts of our system. To account for this, connected inboxes will now cost $4/mo per connected inbox, billed annually ($5/mo billed monthly).
A few points of note:
- This does not apply to linked addresses, only to connections between FUT and your inbox which use your email login credentials.
- Existing accounts will have no price changes at this time.
- We will not shut off currently connected inboxes.
- If you are over limit, adding newly inboxes will be limited unless you are on the corresponding plan for that number of connected inboxes.
Other Simplifications
Further to our theme of simplifying, we made a few difficult decisions to remove some major new parts of our system:
- We killed bulk followups In theory, FollowUpThen is the perfect place for all of your followup needs (bulk, one-to-one, one-to-many, etc.) In practice, it doesn't work that way. People love the simplicity of FUT. It is a good-enough solution for most of your followups, not the expensive "complete full-featured followup solution".
- We killed delayed emails For the same reasons as above, we removed the ability to send delayed emails. It did not align with the reasons people already love and use FUT. It added some interesting new use-cases, but ones which are already well served by existing products.
- We de-prioritized "People" We moved the "People" section to an optional Skill, leaving the main parts of FollowUpThen as simply "Followups" and "Skills." For most users, it will stay that way. For those who need a light-weight way to organize relationships, you can enable this for only $4/mo (billed annually).
Removing these features re-focused our efforts on being the best, simplest followup assistant we can be.
Your personal assistant
FollowUpThen remains a personal followup assistant. During this (long!) experimental beta period, we tried many things. We connected with many users and explored various markets. We're happy to be returning to the simplicity that has defined FollowUpThen for so many of our users.
As we continue to expand functionality, we hope to always be "just another recipient" for you that you can loop into a conversation when you need a followup. How and when that followup arrives might take a little magic on our end. To you, it's just your personal assistant doing their job.
And with that, we're happy to release our latest version in open beta 🚀 You can migrate your account by logging in with your existing username and password at app.followupthen.com.
As always, feel free to get in touch with any feedback!