Slowly and Broken Discount Offers – Again
A topic that deserves attention and discussion
I have posted in our Slowlyapp subReddit in the past, various topics about the occasional discounts offered by Slowly app team.
Sometimes it's for coin purchases (which later can acquire the pretty stamps for use inside the app). And at other times, it's an attempt to gain more users for their paid service level, created last year, and called 'Slowly PLUS!'.
What is Plus?
I wrote a detailed topic about the PLUS service when it was arriving, in August of 2020. New upcoming Slowly PLUS enhanced service – benefits at a cost, would you join?
“Slowly PLUS” as an enhanced, paid service level offering some extra features, perks and inducements. A new funding source for the company to keep the lights on and the servers humming, which is not cheap at all (and tends to climb in cost with a growing user base).
How good of an offering was a topic of discussion in the topic, and from my personal experience, it seems it never got much traction.
Confirmed on their Blog post
A fact confirmed in the most recent Slowly Corporate blog post, by Miss Jojo Chan, a co-founder and senior officer at Slowly Communications.
We are thankful to all early subscribers, especially as we know that the current PLUS features are not competitive enough. Rest assured, this is just the initial version of Slowly PLUS, and there will be more awesome exclusive features coming.
Product pricing, always the core issue
As we foresaw in out reddit discussion, it was hard to see people springing for the paid service level – when the free service is perfectly functional, a fact that thankfully has not been changed to support the paid offering. As it stands, costs are:
The pricing for the PLUS! package is a bit odd, heavily skewed into favouring long term options – the service is listed as 7.99 monthly, 5.50 half yearly and 42.99 USD for yearly service costs.
Another user post about this subject
Earlier this morning, another Reddit and long time Slowly user called nile8994 posted a topic : 20% Discount Bug Or Joke for Early Users like me.
we would like to offer you a 20% discount on Slowly Yearly Subscription so I thought why not grab the deal. But, to my surprise. The discounted price is the same 42.99 USD as it was before the discount. So is it some kind of bug or it's a joke of some kind?
I have seen – and reported, with NO response back from Team Slowly, this exact same situation.
In my case, the discount was even BIGGER, I think it was 30% off. Earlier topic here documenting it - it was the Holiday Sale this past December, 2020.
But following thru did NOT show a reduced price, just their regular 42.99 USD yearly price.
This can be easily construed as False Advertising, and would win if taken to small claims court in most countries, I believe.
Black Friday sale – BOGO ?
I had a similar experience with the Black Friday coin sale offer - the very best deal ever that they have offered, it was advertised as buy one, get one free, or they Doubled up whichever amount you purchased.
A real 50% discount, as it was. Problem — there was NO conditions or statement that this was only for the mobile app store payments, so not available for the Web Client users, which I am.
Buying and supporting the Team, best via Web client
As we have discussed on Reddit, the high 30% commissions charged by the big App Stores (both Apple and Google) are exorbitant for what they do. They inflate the prices, as companies ever only get 70 cents for every dollar spent in their apps and services.
Many developers are finding parallel sale channels, with lower transaction fees – and Slowly does it too. The Web Client transactions are processed at about 3% processing cost, so we recommend everyone use the web store and get more money to the people we care for, the ones creating and maintaining our beloved app.
I even made a nice Blog post detailing the costs, the savings – a good read. 😉👍
So, I went and bought some coins
Bought a small amount of coins, not really needing them, but intending to get the 'Let's go shopping!' classic stamp.
No doubling happened. No stamp was produced. I complained on Twitter and mentioned the false advertising possible claim.
And, what happened?
There was no direct response to my post, public, in their own Black Friday Twitter promo topic. But they made good - doubled my 50 coin purchase, and unlocked the stamp.
Another occasion, and also – no response at all
My later report on this Web Client popup offer not doing what it stated was not responded to at all - and it was a great offer. Yearly price dropped to just over 30.80 USD, from 42.99 for one year.
A tweet about this, the one in the image above, did not receive any response from the company — which is VERY disappointing.
Yes, Slowly – I would have signed up for that price, and still will. ( You have my personal email, and can contact me to set it up if you agree. Thank you!!)
Sometimes, Discount work as expected!
An earlier Topic here which I posted, reporting a 20% discount which DID work in the Web Client. Dropped the price to 34.99 USD – see the image below.
This offer came through in the Slowly Web Client and was exclusively for users who had donated via the 'Buy me a Coffee' feature (which I did, so was qualified).
Conclusion?
Slowly is a wonderful app, but sadly we see these slips, and sometimes there's no fix offered, which denigrates their reputation in my view.
In my response to nile8994 at Reddit I wrote:
I would encourage you to escalate this to their support at getslowly dot com email, and point to this thread also — I will add some links to the relevant posts mentioned in it later.
I am creating this post, might be a good form of calling them to task.
Good work deserves praise, the product is brilliant and well maintained. These small slips are more or less exceptions, but the small bad things is what people will remember first – a sad fact of life, as it is.
Famous Last Words
Special thank you to all the folks behind the SLOWLY app.
Letters we share, with pen pals all over the world. A modern day take in the traditional penpal experience. Come and join us, using SLOWLY.
Follow Blog via your Fediverse/Mastodon account :
@friends-near-and-afar-letters-we-share@wordsmith.social
This page created in MarkDown language. Thank you for reading, feel free to comment, via a direct message to my Twitter account – or the Reddit one.
You can also post a public comment in the Reddit thread for it here.
yann2@bsky.social