Their new paid features and algorithm will be able to determine the best wine to open from your cellar at any given moment. This ensures that we will always be enjoying the perfect wine for that special occasion.
Relevant Ricky
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Freemium subscription model is long overdue. Probably a large portion of users with relatively large collections are freeloaders who don’t pay. Most likely many will convert to premium users if CT can produce enough new features to make it worthwhile.
That being said, I hope they just charge a reasonable flat rate and not the tiered rate based on collection size.
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I was thinking much the same thing. I’d be happy with a $150 or so per yr flat rate.
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Just hope there’s no upcharge for using “classic” mode 
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I love CellarTracker and totally happy to pay for it (and in fact has been paying for it).
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Amongst other things I like how they haven’t sacrificed functionality in the name of UX - Eg advanced search features, ability to export data et. In my view they have probably the most advanced search capability of any consumer discovery platform. So as they improve UX, I hope they keep all of the advanced search features that they have.
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I hope in the paid model the subscription fee isn’t anywhere close to their suggested payment amount for >2000 bottles.
Though putting myself in Eric’s shoes, the platform has a certain amount of development & maintenance cost, which needs to be allocated across a certain number of users. Given this is not a mass adoption product, the cost per user base is likely to be high.
Ps: I did find the title of the post to be unnecessarily sensational. But that’s just me
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I hope there is 
More seriously, I would imagine it can’t be easy for CT to support so many different frontend interfaces simultaneously.
Their “underlying expense” (which I take to mean fixed costs) is spread over a rather larger user base.
The email feature is surprisingly great and, what’s more, they will follow up when it doesn’t work.
Case in point - I forwarded an email that raised an error in the process. A few days later someone from the beta team emailed me explaining that it was due to an umlaut and they were working on supporting it. I was really impressed that they took the time to let me know.
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For me, and mentioned above, is really about content from others about tasting notes on wines. I can manage my cellar with other platforms and apps (such as Excel), but the value comes from looking at recent tasting notes. So, if users drop, not sure to what point the content will not be of much value. Not apples to apples, but when eBob readership/participation waned, I started looking and posting less and less on that site.
And, I do pay the recommended yearly fee, as I can justify the benefit, sort of like Wine-Searcher Pro.
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WIthout question that would be worth $500 a year. 
I actually meant on-going development of the product; as you likely know PS is an extremely sophisticated piece of software that is constantly being improved. While CT is nice, it’s basically a database front end. I pay for various things like that in my professional life, but while a slick front end is nice, the value is in the underlying collection and scrubbing of data; in CT that is largely done by users. Do I get a subscription credit for every review I submit?
I’m not aware of a ton of other DTC SaaS offerings - a few I could think of
GoPro offers a premium suite of cloud services/storage and video editing for $100/year
Strava is $80/year
AllTrails is $36/year
Does Untappd have a paid option?
The weather apps all have paid options and it’s a scam
There’s actually a very interesting parallel website out there for the rock climbing community called Mountain Project. It tracks and categorizes rock climbing areas and routes, and allows you to track your own progress, see what others have done, leave reviews, etc etc. Sound familiar? Now they’ve never charged for that, primarily because ALL of the usefulness of the site comes from user submitted data (and rock climbers as a rule are often broke, especially relative to wine collectors). Now I would argue that’s not true for CT; it’s got a number of really good features like integration with Wine Searcher, critics, and it’s much more feature rich than MP in general. And of course Eric’s never said he’s doing all this for his health. So it reiterate, let’s wait and see.
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Alltrails is a great example. They use data from various sources, but its all public domain, plus user reviews. They are not the source for any data, they are the front-end. That’s very similar to cellartracker. And that’s why I struggle with why and how much to pay for these services that are basically curating/tidying user data or other peoples data. And yes, with 5000+ notes, I kind of feel like I am the product and deserve a discount.
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YMMV, but I believe Eric has always done right by his user base and I am willing to wait and see on the new service offering.
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This assumes that community tasting notes are CT’s only value-add. The community and userbase on CT is clearly their competitive moat, but what’s also clear is that they believe that they can provide additional valuable features on top of that which are worth paying for.
Ill wait and see, but would be shocked if basic service has a mandatory fee. Its user generated data with large network effects, and any price above 0 will reduce userbase considerable. Smaller userbase makes it less valuable, and risks a downwatd spiral.
Far more likely that CT tries to monitize the base with premium features, ads, kickback from Wine-searcher, et.
I have a different problem, there are a very large number of bottles I drank and never removed.
-Al
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This thread is why I never advise companies to pre-announce a pricing or business model change before they’re ready to provide the details. Leaving people to speculate will almost never lead to a good outcome…
FWIW I get more than enough value from Cellartracker to be happy to pay (and I do think about it in terms of how much value I get, not how much it costs to develop and run). Because I want the service to stick around, I’ll be glad to see them move to a business model that is likely more predictable and stable.
But without knowing any details at all, it’s hard to come to any conclusions.
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fuck me that’s a lot of money! (for 1250 bottles of Meomi and 1250 Bottles of charles shaw. )
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Not much interested in new features as I don’t use 90% of the ones on offer now. And I am terrible about deleting bottles as I drink them; the number of bottles shown bares no relation to what is actually in the cellar.
But it is way too early to “rebel” against a cost structure we have not seen. Eric has always been reasonable and I have no reason to expect otherwise
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