While reading through the comments on a recent LifeHacker post about software people purchased this past year, I noticed a comment that said “I bought the pro version of ToDoist”
This immediately perked my interest as ToDoist is one of my favorite GTD (Get Things Done) tools. “Why,” I wondered “had I never seen this pro version before? Was it a secret?”
I surfed over to the site and started looking. It wasn’t on the welcome page that I could see, it wasn’t on my dashboard either. I carefully scanned every available space on the page I normally started and worked on for any kind of “upgrade”option. I couldn’t find anything.
Thinking I must have missed it, I pulled open the windows I rarely looked at. First the “What’s new” page and started to scroll. Sure enough, there’s one mention of a premium account down in the news for August.
Now, August was a big month for me. A trip to California for work, a trip to Portland, Oregon, a trip to Nebraska, my birthday, my parents anniversary and a concert I’d been looking forward to for months. I wasn’t at my desk a lot that month, so naturally I’d missed this announcement.
But there wasn’t another mention of the option anywhere I could find.
This means that those of us using the Web application who either didn’t read the news page or missed it, as I had, really had no idea of an upgrade paid option. There’s no link, outside the preferences tab, to give people a chance to go from a free satisfied user to a paying satisfied customer.
So it makes me wonder, how much money has this secret cost their business?
