Our Usage-Based Pricing Guide
Pricing is complex. Storrito has gone through several iterations to improve its pricing model.
Our first pricing model charged customers per story-post. The story-post balance didn’t roll over to the next month, resulting in complex edge cases that were difficult to understand (even for us). Furthermore, there was a huge imbalance regarding how much value each customer could extract from our service. A small number of users connected hundreds of Instagram accounts and paid pretty much the same amount as other users who had only connected one.
For this reason, our second pricing model charged customers for each connected Instagram account, while permitting unlimited posting of Stories and Reels. This helped us eliminate many pain points associated with the first pricing model. Storrito customers no longer had to plan how many story posts to buy each month without knowing if a big campaign would crop up or if they needed fewer posts than usual. Overall, charging per connected Instagram account made the pricing fairer across the board.
We thought we were done. But, as you all know, we have now entered the age of AI, and our customers rightly expect us to integrate AI features that make them more efficient when working with Storrito. Some will make heavy use of these AI features, while others will use them only on occasion. When you look around, most AI companies charge their customers based on usage. ChatGPT, for example, charges its users per number of words (or, more correctly, tokens), while other services, like ElevenLabs, charge for the length of the audio generated.
Of course, the quickest way to launch AI features without changing our pricing would have been to trust that total customer payments would eventually cover the increase in costs incurred. However, that strategy would hurt both us and our customers - it would force Storrito to charge much higher prices to subsidize a few heavy users. This would have penalized those who only use Storrito for seasonal campaigns, for example.
Enter usage-based pricing (USP): a fairer, more adaptable solution. Here's an overview of how the new USP model will work in Storrito:
Add Funds to Your Wallet: Choose an amount (US dollars) you’re comfortable with at the checkout.
Use Our App, Pay a Tiny Fee per Service: A small amount is deducted from your wallet for each paid service.
Automatic Top-Up: Every month (or year), we automatically refill your wallet by charging your card for the amount you’ve set.
Stop Anytime, Get a Refund: If you no longer need Storrito, we’ll refund any leftover balance.
It might seem simpler to issue a monthly invoice that bills customers for each service used – just like Amazon Cloud (AWS) and Google Cloud do. However, this results in a lot more financial admin. Even if prefer paying annually, you’d still have to process an invoice every month. Waiting for yearly payments is too risky, even for large companies. As a small company, we need to be sure our customers will pay for our services, which is why we developed the prepaid model described above.
New Storrito customers will get started with our usage-based pricing right away, and over time, we'll transition our entire customer base to this model. This will give us the opportunity to unlock exciting new AI features and more.
This approach will also allow us to expand Storrito’s potential to integrate with other platforms (like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, etc.) while ensuring fair pricing for everyone. Moreover, no one wants to pay for features they’re not using – that’s why we won’t charge you to connect an Instagram account when all you’re interested in is our TikTok or AI features 😀
Our first pricing model charged customers per story-post. The story-post balance didn’t roll over to the next month, resulting in complex edge cases that were difficult to understand (even for us). Furthermore, there was a huge imbalance regarding how much value each customer could extract from our service. A small number of users connected hundreds of Instagram accounts and paid pretty much the same amount as other users who had only connected one.
For this reason, our second pricing model charged customers for each connected Instagram account, while permitting unlimited posting of Stories and Reels. This helped us eliminate many pain points associated with the first pricing model. Storrito customers no longer had to plan how many story posts to buy each month without knowing if a big campaign would crop up or if they needed fewer posts than usual. Overall, charging per connected Instagram account made the pricing fairer across the board.
We thought we were done. But, as you all know, we have now entered the age of AI, and our customers rightly expect us to integrate AI features that make them more efficient when working with Storrito. Some will make heavy use of these AI features, while others will use them only on occasion. When you look around, most AI companies charge their customers based on usage. ChatGPT, for example, charges its users per number of words (or, more correctly, tokens), while other services, like ElevenLabs, charge for the length of the audio generated.
Of course, the quickest way to launch AI features without changing our pricing would have been to trust that total customer payments would eventually cover the increase in costs incurred. However, that strategy would hurt both us and our customers - it would force Storrito to charge much higher prices to subsidize a few heavy users. This would have penalized those who only use Storrito for seasonal campaigns, for example.
Enter usage-based pricing (USP): a fairer, more adaptable solution. Here's an overview of how the new USP model will work in Storrito:
Add Funds to Your Wallet: Choose an amount (US dollars) you’re comfortable with at the checkout.
Use Our App, Pay a Tiny Fee per Service: A small amount is deducted from your wallet for each paid service.
Automatic Top-Up: Every month (or year), we automatically refill your wallet by charging your card for the amount you’ve set.
Stop Anytime, Get a Refund: If you no longer need Storrito, we’ll refund any leftover balance.
It might seem simpler to issue a monthly invoice that bills customers for each service used – just like Amazon Cloud (AWS) and Google Cloud do. However, this results in a lot more financial admin. Even if prefer paying annually, you’d still have to process an invoice every month. Waiting for yearly payments is too risky, even for large companies. As a small company, we need to be sure our customers will pay for our services, which is why we developed the prepaid model described above.
New Storrito customers will get started with our usage-based pricing right away, and over time, we'll transition our entire customer base to this model. This will give us the opportunity to unlock exciting new AI features and more.
This approach will also allow us to expand Storrito’s potential to integrate with other platforms (like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, etc.) while ensuring fair pricing for everyone. Moreover, no one wants to pay for features they’re not using – that’s why we won’t charge you to connect an Instagram account when all you’re interested in is our TikTok or AI features 😀
Updated on: 19/02/2025
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