In late November, we launched a new integrated subscription system that will hopefully make subscribing and maintaining your subscription to OpenComps easier, more secure and convenient.
We said good bye to PayPal and the tiered 3-month, 6-month and annual subscriptions that had to be manually renewed and processed. We received many comments that the jolt out of our site and onto PayPal’s payment processing page was not welcome. In addition, many people didn’t really understand that you didn’t have to be PayPal member to complete the subscription process if you so chose. Interestingly also, some complained that they associate PayPal with fraud and just didn’t want to deal with PayPal’s system… although it is our understanding that PayPal accounts for a good chunk of all ecommerce-enabled Internet.
We took this input and set out to find a better solution. This led us to Stripe.com and their developer-friendly API for processing ecommerce transactions. Stripe has been audited by a PCI-certified auditor, and is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1. This is the most stringent level of certification available. And they had all the tools to help us build a better subscription system.
With a new subscription process, we decided to rethink our subscription tiers and made them simpler. We don’t think it gets any simpler than: $50/month or $500/year (pay for 10 months, get 2 months free, if you will). The subscriptions auto-renew, so there is no more hassle of re-subscribing; yet canceling the plans is very easy (right from your user profiles!). If you are commitment-shy, you can simply start and stop on the monthly plan as you wish. (Please note that the plans run for their full duration and there are no refunds for partial periods. We hope that the free-side of the site gives you a good taste of what you can expect as a subscriber!)
We are working on making the subscription process even easier and to provide even more subscription-related information to you – email notifications, online review of invoices/receipts, etc. Stayed tuned.
With the new subscription system in place, we are now reviewing all sections of the site to determine what we could provide for free and what should be available to subscribers only. We have many ideas for expanding the site functionality and usefulness to real estate professionals. But we have to generate income to fund this effort and the associated talent acquisitions. Thus, the free content and capabilities of the site will, unfortunately, shrink over time with full content and capabilities available to subscribers only.
We hope you will appreciate the site’s data and functionality and consider subscribing.