For the last ten years, Handheld Contact pricing has remained the same. Some new less expensive products were introduced along the way, but the pricing has generally remained static.

We recently reviewed our pricing structure to provide more flexible monthly pay-as-you-go subscriptions, and we realized that our current tiers didn’t easily support this offering. For instance, when the annual price for our Basic & Full products worked out to $4.16 and $6.67 respectively per month, the pricing didn’t lend itself well to monthly charges.

New Pricing & Payment Plans
It is with this agenda in mind that we’re implementing changes to both tiers with the Basic products dropping (that’s right, “decreasing”) to $48 even per year ($4/month, billed annually) and our regular full products (both API and Classic) increasing to $84, or $7/month billed annually.

Before we get into a more detailed breakdown of the new monthly vs annual rates, it’s important to acknowledge these new, more flexible payment plans are born of our high confidence in our family of mobile products. Whether you use our Classic or API products, no one can deny these products have improved dramatically in features and reliability in recent years, and our new Handheld Contact Mac product release is further evidence of this commitment.

Back to the new pricing and payment plans, the changes we’re implementing allow us to present a simpler, more intuitive monthly and annual offerings to our customers. For instance, consider the following: 

• Basic (API and Classic): reducing the annual price 4% to $48 per year ($4/month), allows us to offer a monthly package at $5 for customers that want a small regular charge. Yes, $5 is a little more than the annual rate per month, but many customers prefer to pay a little more for the flexibility of a no-commitment payment plan. 
  
  
• Full (API & Classic): Increasing the price 5% of our Premium plans to $84 per year ($7/month), allows us to offer a monthly package at $8.50, and decrease the cost of Mobile Care to exactly half the current price (when bundled with your Premium HHC Subscription).
  For example, Mobile care has always cost $10/month ($120 billed annually). In the summer, we introduced a bundling of Premium plus Mobile care for $144/year. Now that the annual price of our Premium HHC service is $84, Mobile Care can be added for only $60/year, which is 50% off the price of buying Mobile Care separately. An excellent value.
  * Please note Mobile Care and Mobile Care bundling are not available with monthly payment plans.
  
  
• HHC Mac: New product released at the same price as our regular full API & Classic mobile products. Learn more about Handheld Contact Mac

New Auto-Renewal Option
To support the new monthly plans, which we plan to implement sometime in October, we’re also introducing a new auto-renewal option for all accounts. Having to renew an account every month how our current annual plans are renewed would quickly discourage customers from using it. The idea is to make this process easier, simpler, and more flexible. Accordingly, monthly subscribers will be encouraged to enable the new “auto-renewal” option and provide a valid major credit card (VISA, MC, or AMEX) for processing payments. We’ll also soon be introducing PayPal as a payment option!

Annual accounts can also have this feature enabled for easier account management. The subscribers have until the last day of their subscription term to cancel or disable auto-renewal. This auto-renewal process will be simple to use and simple to stop based on the user’s needs.

Handheld Contact has seen many service disruptions over the years when customers manage their own accounts and leave payment to the last minute. As you might guess, when renewals are processed annually, many customers forget how they processed their payment the year before and call us urgently after their subscription has lapsed. This new auto-renewal feature solves this problem.

We’re strong believers that customers like choices. Whether the option is a cheaper feature-gated Basic version of Handheld Contact, the full Premium product, or their alternative of monthly versus annual payment plans, we want to deliver quality services that offer our customers choice, simplicity, and flexibility.