Medalist is the best solution for athletes to create their websites. We're now aligning all our efforts to do just that.  

Why we are lowering the price from $35/month to $25/month

It's still too early to judge if it will prove to be a great or a bad business decision. In order for the trade of to be profitable, it will required many more athletes to convert into customers than with the previous pricing structure. For example, to break even on the revenues from 20 athletes, we'll need 30. 

Most would advise to raise our prices because we evolve in a niche market with limited distribution and exposure. We disagree. Too many athletes have turned down Medalist because it was too expensive for them. It sucked. Not because we lost money but because it's hard to see an athlete turning down your product and stick with his ugly website or attempt to create a descent one with an other website builder. The later is even more painful especially when you know your product is an order of magnitude better than any other alternative.

How we'll pass along the lower price to our current customers

Without our current customers, we wouldn't be here right now. It would be absurd to turn our back on our most valuable asset and loudest supporter by ignoring the fact that they paid more for the service than athlete who will join in the future.

We decided that every athlete will be upgraded to the new plan. So customers who were on the monthly plan will see their bill lowered from $35 to $25 per month. 

Where it becomes tricky is for the athletes who opted for the discounted annual plan for $300. They account for roughly 70% of our customer base. Upgrading them to the new plan on their next billing cycling would be unfair over the monthly customers who get the new price right away.

Instead, thanks to Stripe's pro-rata feature, we're able to compensate them with the price difference under the form of a credit to be applied on the next billing. For example, a customer who would have published his site earlier this week would get next year's subscription at $180 rather than the advertised $240.

Why we are opting for the freemium model

We believe that the hardest part for an athlete is the ‘hump’ right before making it where you have to pay for everything and yet to have substantial funding or any real sponsorships opportunities.

It’s for these up and coming athletes that we want to offer a solution to jumpstart their online presence and help them grow their online brand.

The more athletes the happier we get. It’s what keeps us awake at night!

The philosophy behind the Starter Plan

The Starter Plan is meant to be the best free website out there for an up and coming athlete. 

We decided to keep it under the form of a one pager where all the content will be included in the feed. 

Challenges arising with the Fremium model

Offering a free plan isn't the magic solution. Yes it is likely to bring along a lot more athlete on our platform but it will bring it's fair share of challenges. 

Most of them are related to the fact of having a large base of user out of which only a small portion is actually paying for the service. It's usually fine if you're a company with human and financial resources but for us it can be a double-edged sword. 

With half a person in charge of customer support, we may very well be end up way over our head trying to help thousands of athletes at the same time. It becomes tricky when you have to pick the one who might end up a customer over a customer who've paid for your service for a long time. 

An other challenge will be to keep uniqueness and individuality of the websites. Coming up with more layouts and visual options will be a key to retain the value of the websites. Having more users on the platform will undeniably accelerate the saturation.

Have a shot at the new Medalist site!