As we thought, is it worth keeping free customers, and how much it will cost us

Trying to differentiate in the market for time tracking services, we came to the introduction of a free service for monitoring employees . We decided on this, considering how much it would cost us to keep a free client and how many such we can afford.

Understanding that you need to clear up your competitors more clearly came to us three months after the start of the promotion of StaffCounter . A large number of analogues on the market with almost identical calls to a potential client, the competition of their followers on the network on the topic “who will save more money for business” - all this made us understand that if our service is not unique, then we just merge with the crowd.
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Recall that StaffCounter.net measures employee productivity, based on the results of the analysis of his activity for the PC. Such analysis requires the constant reception, processing and storage of data from computers and mobile devices of employees on our server.

“Measuring Productivity” or “Employee Monitoring”?

A unique offer appeared due to the study of the opinions of our customers. As it turned out, in more than 50% of cases, managers or owners of companies use tools to measure productivity simply as an additional point of control for employees. Sometimes not even control is important, but the very existence of such an opportunity.

There is a simple explanation for this: each company and a manager follow their own algorithm for optimizing work and determine the productivity of their employees in their own way. And the time spent by an employee in social networks, or his accidental lateness, are by no means criteria.

These factors have pushed us to offer a new package of services for simplified control. We calculated that we can afford to make it completely free.

Analysis of the cost of different rates for StaffCounter.

Five years ago, we created the cloud platform Kidlogger.net, and last year we planted StaffCounter on it. It was originally designed for an impressive number of free customers, since it was clear that there would be much more of them than paid ones. The platform provides the most economical way to collect, process and store data.

4 years ago it was known that the use of Amazon ECS clouds, Windows Azure will be rated in all directions: place / time CPU \ SQL queries. And the price for the "place" will not be the highest. Therefore, it is the savings on SQL \ CPU resources that can ultimately give an advantage in the market.

Characteristics of a free account on StaffCounter.net:

1. The activity log is stored on the server only HTML file. Maximum file size: 150 kb in one day. To store each user's history, it is necessary to allocate up to 5 MB of space (i.e., multiply the number of monitoring devices by 5). The log contains a list of all user actions on the computer or phone. After analyzing it, it is possible to draw conclusions about what the child, employee or spouse was doing at the computer and how much time each action took.

2. In the database you need to store as little data as possible: only 100 rows in SQL tables per day for each device. At the same time, the size of the data itself is not as critical as the number of requests to the database.

3. Lack of reports: we exclude the possibility of maintaining internal statistics, which is also stored in SQL. Thus, it turns out: up to 20 SQL queries each time the client server is accessed; up to 200 requests when entering the account; complete absence of SQL queries for creating reports when the client is not on the site.

In summary: We allocate for each free client up to 10 MB of disk space. The amount of SQL \ CPU resources consumed is negligible. The result is substantial savings. All this is multiplied by the number of client devices connected to the server for monitoring.

Characteristics of a paid account on StaffCounter.net:

1. The activity log is stored on the server in an HTML file. Under all data (magazines, screenshots) 100 MB of disk space is allocated.
2. In the SQL database, you need to store data from the activity log to automatically generate reports - approximately 300,000 lines per day for each device.

3. A lot of SQL resources are spent on reports and internal analytics. And after the introduction of functions for the autonomy of work (automatic notification of violations, constant reports to the mail), it is difficult to calculate how much SQL queries are spent on one paid client, even when it is not on the site.

In summary: A paid client consumes about 50 times more server resources, especially SQL \ CPU.

How much is a free client today?

Currently, StaffCounter.net and KidLogger.net are sharing one Dell PowerEdge R730 server. The price is $ 450 and includes technical support. Thus, StaffCounter.net can count on 30% of resources within the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 2.40GHz Octa-Core, 128 GB RAM and 10 TB of disk space.

But what would have happened if we started with the simplest Intel Core i7 server, 32GB Ram, 2 TB HDD: a $ 40 server + its $ 90 tech support + other measures to maintain the free $ 200 tariff. It turns out that the total cost per customer would be $ 330 per month.
Based on our experience with Kidlogger.net, about 5,000 free and 500 paid clients fit on this server. The approximate number of clients at the start (about ten free and no paid) will subsequently increase.

Now one free customer costs us $ 3.3 ($ 330/100). This figure will reach $ 0.07 when the number of customers grows to 5 thousand.
After half a year, the cost will be less than $ 1.

Conclusion: in order to be positioned on the market as a “free system of control of employees over a computer”, we must be prepared for these costs. Moral readiness is an accomplished fact. Let's see how things go physically :)