When the Elephant in the Room is a Zebra
We may be the most expensive link manager money can buy. We think it's worth it, but we also think it's worth explaining.
By link-management standards, Zebra is pretty expensive. The first paid tier sits well above the entry plans from other providers. The fact is if you only care about making shorter links, and you don’t care about advanced features or value a carefully assembled UX – there are much better options available. But Zebra still shines in ways that make it well worth the price for a lot of subscribers.
Much more than shorter
The first job of a link shortener: make the links short. But how we get there matters. It turns out, making a good user experience around that process is important too. There are a dozen tiny details in the user experience of link creation that can make that experience feel fluid v. jarring… responsive v. sluggish, or little better v. a lot worse. Getting them right isn’t always easy or obvious.
But building a good UX for our users is only half the battle, we wanted it for their users too. And there is only one dial we can turn that counts in that particular flow, and that dial is redirect latency. AKA SPEED. And this is an area where Zebra also really shines. But
To achieve this, we built Zebra on top of what we consider to be the best pieces of technology available in their categories. We also buy more capacity than we need, to be certain our services levels don’t dip or fray under load. And while over-subscribing to the best available services might not be the best for our bottom line, we can do it because our subscribers pay a premium, with the expectation that their users will also get a great experience.
The new age of artisanal development
Being expensive also allows us to grow slower. We know a lot of our customers by name, and we like it that way. We never expect Zebra to be a $20M ARR business, and it doesn’t need to be to be a success. At the dawn of an era you might call Artisanal Development, we need a small legion of loyal Pro subscribers, 100 happy Agency subscribers, and a small cadre of Enterprise subscribers to keep Zebra’s future bright.
That leads to very different pricing decisions. Zebra does not need the largest possible number of accounts paying the smallest possible amount. It needs a limited group of clients for whom a industry leading performance, privacy-focused analytics and a great overall user experience matter, and have enough business value that the subscription is a sensible operating cost.
That does not mean the intended customer is careless about money. It means the customer can connect Zebra to revenue, client delivery, campaign reporting, or time saved, and can decide that the product earns its place.
The objective is to build the best link manager I know how to build. It is for people who want that particular product and can make the price work inside their business. Someone who mainly needs to shorten an occasional URL should choose a cheaper service. There are many good ones.
A more affordable future
Having said all of this, we do want to make Zebra more affordable over the long term. And we think we know how to do it without I do want more people to use Zebra and have access to parts of the product that are useful well beyond agencies.
There will never be a free tier, but a more affordable paid plan is on the roadmap. Its exact shape is not settled. It will probably have tighter limits on new links and some of the higher-cost parts of the product, while keeping the basic experience complete enough to be useful.
[Interest form for the more affordable Zebra plan will go here.]
The current plans are still the clearest expression of what Zebra is being built for: a small number of customers who depend on links as part of their business and want a link manager designed with that level of use in mind.