Jamkazam is moving onto Paid Subscriptions. Donors and volunteers' thoughts?

[waarhorse777]

This was totally expected.  Something like this for free wasn't going to last. Plus - with the expectation of support? Pay for it. Go Fund Me is a donation pledge not a reservation for future products.  I for one am happy to see this taking the next step in reliability. While free was fun (and thank you for the Free time during Covid) I'm excited to see what comes next!

[Mike Garrahan]

Are the paid premium user subscriptions available yet? I see the paid tiers and descriptions, but I cannot find where to sign up for them. If they're available please post a link. TIA.

The My Account page has a new Subscription item at the top. You can choose a plan there and enter payment information under Payments. They start billing when your trial plan expires.

[Sharpie]

This was totally expected.  Something like this for free wasn't going to last. Plus - with the expectation of support? Pay for it. Go Fund Me is a donation pledge not a reservation for future products.

Not necessarily expected, and quite possibly going to last.  I use Jamulus a lot instead of Jamkazam (it has a different architecture which works better with larger groups).  Jamulus is open source - that means people contribute their own time to develop the code and support users, at no cost to anyone.  Open source is a well trodden route for software development that has been going on for years.  It's used just about everywhere.  People then make money by adding value on top of the software - e.g. with better support or their own add-ons. 

The idea that applications must be paid for as commercial products is quite out of date.  In the case of Jamulus it was started by a Swiss developer who wanted to solve the problem for his own band mates.  Jamkazam was started by a USA start-up looking to make money.  In that context it's no surprise that the "owners" of JamKazam (no one "owns" Jamulus) want to cash-in on the increased interest that COVID has brought.  What I find a little objectional though is that they collect donations whilst offering no paid subscription in return.

[WaltherB]

I also saw the message today, that the use of JamKazam will be based on subscriptions. That is ok for me, as long as the quality will improve. But now to the relative short trial period (until end December 2020). It says, that my account has been allocated to the Platinum subscription until end December. But when I e.g. want to record a session, the button is not activated, although this feature is part of the Platinum subscription. So, what is to do? Do I have to "activate" the Platinum subscription now, and it will not be charged until end December? Or am I doing something wrong here?
Thank you for your answer

[terryh]

I don't object in principle to paying for something that I value - and I do value Jamkazam and have previously donated money to help fund development. I just think that the prices are way too high for something that is, to be charitable, a rather poor beta release. Only yesterday I had the client crash twice in the space of an hour - once when I wasn't touching anything, just chatting to someone. 

What I can't understand at all is the pricing model. Why does a larger group have to pay more per person to use the software? It makes no commercial sense! If anything, it should be cheaper per person for larger groups. A group of 10 has to pay $100 a month for the privilege of using Jamkazam, whereas a group of 4 can meet for an hour a week for free. Where's the logic in that?

There are many thousands of people who use and value Jamkazam on a regular basis. Surely it would be better to keep them all in the fold by charging a couple of dollars a month, than to drive most of them - and particularly larger groups - into the hands of the competition. At least until JK works reliably. They could always offer better quality/service for higher prices, but still keep it possible for larger groups to keep using the software without spending a fortune on something that isn't finished yet.

I just hope they read this forum and reconsider. We are already starting to evaluate the various other options out there.

[karelr]

I don't object in principle to paying for something that I value - and I do value Jamkazam and have previously donated money to help fund development. I just think that the prices are way too high for something that is, to be charitable, a rather poor beta release. Only yesterday I had the client crash twice in the space of an hour - once when I wasn't touching anything, just chatting to someone. 

What I can't understand at all is the pricing model. Why does a larger group have to pay more per person to use the software? It makes no commercial sense! If anything, it should be cheaper per person for larger groups. A group of 10 has to pay $100 a month for the privilege of using Jamkazam, whereas a group of 4 can meet for an hour a week for free. Where's the logic in that?

There are many thousands of people who use and value Jamkazam on a regular basis. Surely it would be better to keep them all in the fold by charging a couple of dollars a month, than to drive most of them - and particularly larger groups - into the hands of the competition. At least until JK works reliably. They could always offer better quality/service for higher prices, but still keep it possible for larger groups to keep using the software without spending a fortune on something that isn't finished yet.

I just hope they read this forum and reconsider. We are already starting to evaluate the various other options out there.


Agreed, though I've had increasing and tremendous success with JK, the audio keeps getting better, and the streams much more reliable in the last couple of months.  It has been a life- and sanity-saver!  My experience has been that either JK sets up easily and wonderfully well, or it takes many many hours to set up properly.  Over the months there have been major crashes, some significant enough to interrupt the stream, severe limits on number of participants (in October I was able to stream a quartet without interruption for the first time; up until then even the trio streams were iffy).  And now having invested all those hours to get it working beautifully, to find out that subscription costs will probably send most of those musicians with whom I've been playing away because:

-they aren't using JK enough to warrant the cost (online gigs are hard to come by)
-those gigs just aren't making much money
-the only good option for streaming seems to be the platinum plan
-the more musicians I want to play with, the more it will cost

I have suggested different pricing:
perhaps a fee per stream, including a rehearsal/tech set up, or in general pricing based on usage
perhaps a discount for bands/groups who play together regularly

I truly appreciate David, Peter and Seth's incredibly hard work and dedication to JK.  It's a brilliant program and when it works well, it's a lifeline!

best,
karel

[CharlesS]

Wow! After I donated $200 to their GoFundMe. Seriously?
So I fund the development of the platform and as a thank you I get to pay for tiered, subscription service. Out of the Blue. No warning. No communication 
I would have been happy to pay for the service.
I’m not at all happy about being manipulated and used.
Nice betrayal piece JamKazam. I’ll definitely be expecting FAR better service and communication  in the future.

[cah329a]

• Fellow users, have you received any announcement or newsletter regarding the coming paid subscription plans? 
  

• And again, the community of people who make Jamkazam such a lively and noisy place - what are your thoughts?
  

Yes, I received an email announcement yesterday with all the details. As an active daily user, I'm all in favor of subscription pricing and have been expecting it to happen for a while. I have one student on JK now and expect to have more.  My musical buddy and I have streamed live concerts to the Web from JK and look forward to doing more. And we're right now in the midst of recording some of our JK collaborations and sharing them on social media. Without JK we would have been stuck in our own studios in Brooklyn and Pittsburgh for the last nine months, bored to death and craving musical companion$p. JK  has been a real lifesaver and I am completely happy to have a way to support it and help the developers improve its functionality.

I contributed to the GoFundMe a few months ago and was happy to see how much that supercharged development, so I'm looking forward to even more improvements as JamKazam transitions to a subscription model.

Cindy Harris
Pittsburgh, PA

---

Does this mean, for example, that a group of 6 members will need to come up with 6 x 4.99 = 30 $ a month (360 $/year) and 20 choristers (if this size group is even possible with JK) would have to pay 20 x 10 $ monthly = 200 $ or 2400 $ /year? For a modestly-sized amateur chorus this is a non-starter IMHO.

It's not clear to me that this is what is meant. What I expect is that the person who starts the session is the one whose account controls the length of the session. So if a Gold member starts a session, the session might go on for hours, but someone with a basic account would be bounced after one hour. That makes much more sense than insisting that everyone has to be at the same level.

Regarding "affordability" think about this: if my community chorus was currently rehearsing, we'd be paying about $2400 per year to rent space. It's not very unreasonable to pay that to JK in exchange for the ability to really sing together. I'm also expecting that there will be special plans for school and church groups, so this looks like a fairly minor concern to me.

I'm sure we'll see answers to this kind of thing coming before the end of January. Until then, existing users have Platinum privileges anyway, so I'm not yet worried that I'll lose my jam buddies :-)

Cindy Harris
Pittsburgh, PA

[DaveK]

Is there a discernible difference between the Free plan Audio Stream Quality rate of 128 kbps vs. the increasingly faster rates that come with the higher level subscriptions? I am especially interested in whether or not I will notice a difference between the Gold rate of 256 kbps and the Platinum rate of 512 kbps. 

Can anyone accurately describe the trade-offs in performance in terms of my individual experience, and my combined experience, assuming that the folks I am playing with will be at different subscription levels?

[lconway]

I did awake to a notification of the change. I had feared they would use our good will donations to build a platform they could then bill us for, and they did not disappoint.

Since the pricing includes the max number of players I could argue that that number of players should be included in the price. So one band member buys a $4.95 plan and up to 6 people can be invited into the session hosted by the owner. I am sure that is not their intent, but words have meaning.

I am also concerned abut how much the throttled bandwidth is going to impact connectivity and quality. I like JK and am not prepared to pull the plug just yet. BUT, it is not stable enough - still issues - even with max available bandwidth up until now - to continue paying for very long.

I am going to address the 6 subscribers needed versus 1 subscriber issue with support.

Team JamKazam needs to be careful that they don't kill the horse that got them this far...