Dear Sprout Builder Users,
One of the toughest decisions that a start-up faces is where to focus its efforts and resources. Sprout Builder was our first product and has always been near and dear to our hearts. More importantly, we value the customers who have gotten us to where we are today. However, we have made the hard decision to shut down the Sprout Builder subscription service to focus on our enterprise product lines. The only service level that we will continue to offer for Sprout Builder is geared towards enterprise customers. The cost is $2999 a year.
If you are a paying customer you will receive an email from PayPal saying that your account has been cancelled. This is to ensure that you will not be autobilled. You WILL still have access to Sprout Builder until March 30th.
We know you probably have a lot of questions about the transition so please review the FAQ for details.
Sincerely,
Carnet Williams
Co-Founder and CEO
Disappointing. I appreciate that we all need to periodically adapt our business models but I wonder how many small businesses will be negatively impacted. Given there are ~ 4.5 million of them under 50 employees it seems to me that there may indeed be a potential market.
Can (will) you suggest an alternative? It’s probably a fair assumption that many SB’s are not candidates for your enterprise product. Perhaps a strategy that graduates your pricing structure may prove workable.
It’s good to see such a forward-thinking business be so proactive in its operations and development. Thank you for the forthright and frank nature of this post: ‘Enterprise customers are our target, small business customers and clients are not.’ The free account has always been a way for folks to have clients experience the power and utility of the Sprout platform firsthand, and why we’ll be sad to see it go, we only hope that this move ensures that Sprout will be around for a long time to come, rather than another painful step toward it end and ultimate irrelevance.
Thanks for all you do, Sprout!
- m
Ken,
Thanks for your note and for using Sprout. We’re not comfortable recommending a specific tool to our users, though we did look carefully at the market to see if there was a comparable service that we could transition our users to. In the end, there just wasn”t anything out there quite like Sprout. The fact is that it’s a very powerful tool and is suited to enterprise users. We hope that those users who really use the product will recognize that the subscription $2,999 is an incredible value.
I have to say my heart sunk when your email hit my inbox. I use Sproutbuilder endlessly to update a large church website. The widget allowed me to remotely update the slideshow on the home page to reflect upcoming events and announcements. Sad to see you go, but this won’t be something I could afford. One word for those who are looking for an alternative: WIX.
Thanks so much, Sproutbuilder. It was quite a ride while it lasted!
I see the value in shifting business priorities, but just shutting down all existing Sprouts with no option to export?! Im a freelancer who has used SproutBuilder for a few projects and now I have no choice but to completely rebuild my clients’ widgets from scratch on another platform.
Disappointing to see the loss of SproutBuilder, but even more disappointing to see you put your small paying clients in such a bad spot, because I can hardly believe I am the only one affected like this.
this means when we are purchasing the enterprise solution we still will have the sproutbuilder tool available, or will the tool itsel as well be closed
So sorry to see that you will be cutting off all of the non “enterprise level” customers… I went to upgrade my account only to find that the option is gone! I have spent at least a solid week worth of time (40+ hours) crafting my sprout only to find out that it will be shut down just after I launch! Depressing and frustrating. It would be a great service if you find some way to allow your “non enterprise” users to export their sprouts as self contained SWF files or some format. I can only imagine the hundreds if not thousands of sprout users whose effort will all be rendered useless. This is not a perfect solution… but it seems that it is the best compromise to help your supporters who you can no longer support. Hopefully you can find a way to accommodate the immense effort exerted by the user community and honor the relationship that existed.
why do you moderate out all critical comments? There are a lot of angry and disappointed Sprout Builder customers out there talking in the blogosphere and social networks talking about your $3000 ransom note.
I’m completely dissapointed right now. I’m 17 years old and I run the major sites HisGoldenEyes.com, Mockingjay.net, mortalinstruments.net, which are part of the network PageToPremiere.com. These sites get over 50,000 hits every day. I paid you a good amount every month. I didn’t mind paying it since it was an AMAZING service. If there is any way I can continue using it at this price…it would be amazing. I can’t afford the new price. I’ve used it since right when the BETA started. HisGoldenEyes.com uses Sprout as a MAJOR component in the site, with three sprouts on the front page above the fold. PageToPremiere.com is made ENTIRELY FROM SPROUT. Please, please, don’t do this. You must realize that this is unfair. I understood when I had to start paying for Sprout, after it had been free. You warned me. This time, it’s entirely out of the blue and I’m stuck with my 10’s of thousands of people that use my Sprouts having blank spaces on the pages. If you transition a free service into a paid one, we think it’s here to stay. We plan our business models, our sites after it, and don’t expect that to change. Now you just cut off a major resource that we can’t replace, and it’s going to cause many people to lose a big source of income, or even have to close their business. We relied on you. If there is any way I can advertise, or anything else, I’d love to, in exchange for my account.
This transition, and the transition under way at Clearspring, make for an interesting comparison:
http://changingway.org/2010/02/16/widgets-and-the-webs-amputation-ward/
Andrew,
We would have given folks the possibility of export if it was possible. However, due to the technology that underlies that Sprout platform the widgets that it creates cannot live without being attached to the platform itself. We realize this is a major inconvenience which is why existing Sprouts will run for three months before shutting down.
Yes, if you choose to upgrade your account you’ll be using essentially the same too. Note that this offer is ONLY good for existing customers as a thank you for using our tool in the past.
Jeff,
We’re trying to respond to those comments where we can provide useful information. There are plenty of places to vent frustration, but we hope this post will be a place people can find relevant information. For example, many complaints have come in about exporting sprouts and we posted to explain why this is not actually possible with our technology.
Kimmy,
Again we’re very sorry that your pages will be affected by the sunsetting of this product. We believe that those users who have had success with Sprout will be good candidates for the enterprise level product. Perhaps you can find ways to get more value from the platform in order to justify the subscription price. Considering how powerful Sprout Builder is, the price of other software packages online, and the bandwidth costs of serving Sprouts we believe this is an affordable offering. Also, keep in mind that the $2,999 is targeted towards existing customers, not new customers. Our enterprise customers typically come in at a significantly higher level.
Well i learned my lesson here. A design solution that has basiclly been built by a community of beta users and their feedback, is now to good to be available for private persons.
Im really not trying to be rude, but even if i had that kind of money, i would rather invest it into some books about Flex programming and come up with my own solution than helping Sprout go “enterprise”.
Mark my words, no company will keep investing this kind of money into a tool as limited as sproutbuilder, without your base of small-buisness and private users this is just a matter of time. do the math =/
nice to know you.
Steven Wild
*trolls off to buy adobe flex builder”
Steven,
Our solution is available to private users and we have many who have taken up our offer of a $2,999 account. The fact is that the costs associated with providing this service necessitate moving towards enterprise clients. That said, we do believe that the cost of getting the Adobe product and coming up to speed with it would actually cost more due to the steep learning curve. Plus, we’ve already got relationships with partners that allows us to plug into their systems (YouTube, for example).
We’re sorry that you’re leaving and hope you’ll consider working with Sprout again for larger scale projects.
Honestly, why would anyone pay $3000 and put any work into creating media with this tool, if it exists only as long as sprout does? What if the price is $10,000 next year? You either pay or lose it all.
Does the Enterprise edition allow for exporting or are the Enterprise customers taking the same gamble?
Leo,
I think this is always an issue that people have to think through when they work with a software as service. How do we know that Flickr will be around in a year and/or what they’ll charge? In the end, we don’t. Will it be easy to pull down your images? Maybe, but it’s a calculated risk. Of course, one of the factors is price and at our new pricing levels we feel we’ll have long term sustainable business growth. In terms of exporting content, refer to some of my earlier comments in which I explain why the content in Sprout is platform dependent.