It’s been eight months since our beta release and Stock Rover is….still totally free. Because of this, we’re often asked what our business model is, or if we even have one. Sometimes we sense a tinge of anxiety in your questions—and we get it, you don’t want to grow attached, only to one day discover that you’re unable to login, but “for a mere $500 a month, you can enjoy all that Stock Rover has to offer!” Or worse, find our domain name up for sale because we’ve run ourselves into the ground.
But fear not. Stock Rover will remain affordable (although our plan isn’t actually to “lose money,” as co-founder and CEO Howard Reisman recently joked in an interview with Tradestreaming). While we are still hammering out the details, we want to shed some light on our long-term business strategy and what you can expect in the coming months.
It’s true, of course, that Stock Rover can’t stay entirely free forever. A key driver of our product, however, has been the belief that individual investors should have access to professional-grade data without paying through the nose, and so we intend to keep the price as affordable as possible. We’ll also provide ample notice before the change, so you won’t be blindsided by a paywall.
So let’s get down to the brass tacks: When? How? And how much?
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Right now we expect Stock Rover to become a subscription-based service sometime in early 2013, likely in late winter or early spring. Again, we will let you know the exact date when we have one.
The details haven’t been fully fleshed out yet, but we expect that some of the more advanced aspects of the product will be subscription-based. Users will be able to subscribe on a quarterly or yearly basis.
We haven’t set a price yet, but we think that you will be pleasantly surprised. Our mission is to help individual investors make better decisions, and we want to help as many investors as possible by keeping Stock Rover as affordable as we can.
In addition, we aim to always provide a free version of the tool—the details of which haven’t been precisely determined, but it would likely lack some of the more advanced capabilities and features. However it’s defined, the free version of Stock Rover should still prove to be a very useful tool for new or casual investors.
At the moment, we are focused on growing our active user base (by the way, have you told all of your friends and acquaintances about Stock Rover?) and continually updating and improving the product according to user feedback and our own product roadmap.
Speaking of the roadmap, here’s a sneak peek into what you can expect from Stock Rover in the not-too-distant future:
So there it is. To sum up: monetization is in the pipeline for 2013, but the details have not yet been fully defined. We’ll keep you up to speed in the coming months as we solidify our product plans and establish pricing. Until then, please enjoy Stock Rover to its fullest, catch-free.
Finally, thank you kindly to all of the users who have already helped guide us to a stronger Stock Rover. As always, you can continue to send us your feedback by clicking the ‘Feedback’ button in the top right of the Stock Rover screen, or by emailing support@stockrover.com.
