Lessons Learned From Sproutbuilder Shutting Down

Don’t trust the cloud.

Or I should say, don’t trust the cloud alone.

Sproutbuilder is a service that was recommended to me by a friend to check out.  Since they had been around a couple years, it seemed a good fit for a few projects so I signed up for a monthly subscription. Well, Sproutbuilder is shutting down in the next 45 days, and so all the work we’ve done on that platform is going to be lost (and we will have to spend time re-creating).

Look, I get the need to focus the business. Although ditching everyone who pays less than $3,000 a month when you had service offerings that were less than one tenth of that seems quite a stretch, I get it. I understand you gotta focus. However, there are lessons to be learned and I will NOT consider paying Sprout’s ransom to keep my account. I’d rather spend the money in time recreating things than to be locked down.

Subscribers of the service cannot download or keep any of the materials they create. Even with this losing of service, everyone is screwed because Sprout is not allowing you to take the stuff you created, so many people are just going to be out of luck completely. In our case, that’s my fault for choosing a service like that, even though at the time it seemed like the perfect fit. I should have remembered my lessons.

Lesson One: If You Can’t Take It With You, Don’t Use It

Sproutbuilder locks you into their proprietary files, and you can’t download and save your work locally. This is why I will not even consider spending $3000 for a service from a company I obviously cannot trust, because they’ll just pull the plug with little support. It’s not just Sproutbuilder – you should never trust cloud services on their own. If you cannot keep a local copy or mirror of your stuff, do not use it. You’re putting your business fate in the hands of others without a backup plan.

Lesson Two: Companies Will Fail

Even the biggest of companies can fail, and you cannot have yourself be exposed to it. We’re losing quite a few hours of work because we can’t bill recreating stuff, but we have to do it, because we’re living up to our responsibilities even when Sprout did not. Again, easily solved if one could take what you created with you. Sprout Inc. and Sproutbuilder is a customer relations failure because they don’t let you do that, and they’ve erased any trust I might have to pay them $3,000 per year.

Lesson Three: You’re Going To Have To Pay More In The Future

I personally think the days of inexpensive or free services that are reliable are coming to a close. Outside of ones funded by Google, I don’t think that there’s a possibility for these services who start free to have a future. Very few (if any) have shown that they can make the transition from free to paid. The real route to success is having a paid product or service to begin with so it has an established a value with the consumer.

Sproutbuilder was a free product at the start, and I think that monetizing from free to a subscription is simply a hard road to go down and I would not invest there.Much better is to just charge from the beginning – what’s the point if you have a half million users if you’re losing money on them, unless you’re a charity?

Why Freemium Doesn’t Work For Almost All Businesses

The reason why the transition from free to paid doesn’t work is psychology. Although you love your product or service and it may have value, outside of the tech bubble if you set your price at “free” the monetary value by the purchaser is zero, no matter how much they rely on you. Convincing more than a very small percentage of people that it’s worth more than free is extremely hard, and even harder is getting them to pay an amount that makes money. Bits are free, but people are not.

Logically, if that convincing users to the paid product had occurred in sufficient numbers in the case of Sproutbuilder, they wouldn’t have discontinued the service levels. It’s always easier to lower your prices than to raise them.

I’ll take any of your recommendations in the comments for other services and Sprout or Sproutbuilder alternatives. The work we need to recreate is relatively small, and of course, we’re willing to pay for the service. I also hope there’s a general lesson remembered (at least on our part) that if you can’t take it with you, don’t use it.