What’s this all about?

We’re raising the price of Gimlet. Starting on September 1, 2014, the first branch for an account will be $20 per month; each additional branch will be $10 per month. More details will be up soon at our pricing page.

Wait, what? Why are you doing this?

Gimlet is our first product — indeed, our first foray into the business world. When we launched more than four years (and seven million questions!) ago, $10 per month was our honest best guess of what we’d need to charge to cover both ongoing support and continued development of Gimlet. We knew technical and billing support would take some time, but greatly underestimated it.

What we’re working to balance is this: We want Gimlet to be cheap enough that no one ever needs to keep reference stats by making marks on paper again. At the same time, we need to charge enough to build a sustainable business.

What about existing clients?

Existing clients may stay at their current price until September 1, 2014. While we’d like to make that a permanent offer, we can’t afford to.

At the same time, we don’t plan to make a habit of raising our prices. We know you have budgets and plans to prepare, and that changing prices complicates those. We know that the more data you have stored in Gimlet, the more it would hurt to migrate to another service — and we absolutely do not want to take advantage of our most steadfast clients.

What if we’ve paid ahead with an annual invoice?

If you’ve paid ahead, we’ll charge you the new price on your first invoice after September 1.

This makes us really sad! Or: We have questions!

Talk to us. Send us a message at support@gimlet.us, or email me directly at nate@gimlet.us. If you want a public discourse, post in the comments of this blog entry. If you’d like to talk over the phone, send us an email and we’ll set something up.

From us: Thank you.

We can’t express enough gratitude to everyone who has made our success possible by signing up for accounts, talking to us at conferences, sending us feedback, and telling their friends about us. We’re honored to be helping so many libraries do business.