This seems like a very useful service. I think that you may be losing quite a lot of business by jumping from free to $49 directly.
There is probably a sweet spot at around $19 for say 250 pages and login support that would attract a lot of hobbyists/developers who work on one web app or a couple of sites and wouldn't pay $49 a month for something like this.
Chargify changres nothing for the first 50 clients and then I think it is a flat fee if I am not mistaken. That can be cheaper than Spreedly. Recurly seems to be doing something similar.
What does make a difference is that Spreedly is not PCI compliant. Both Chargify and Recurly are PCI compliant.
I am sorry I didn't quote the name of the author at the first place. I couldn't recall where I had read it. I searched around for a while and couldn't find it so I just posted without the author's name but in quotes to show it was from someone other than me.
Thank you for finding the book title, it helped me find the the site where I originally read this.
I am in the market for such an application and my budget is up to $150 per month but I find the 'action based' pricing model a huge turn-off. If I am paying $50 upward, I want to be able to automate tests freely and run them nightly without ever thinking how many 'actions' I have left.
The UI is decent, it lacks support for pages that require authentication from what I can see, and I couldn't find any features for running tests regularly (e.g. nightly).
I find it hard to imagine that anyone would sign-up and pay that much money to be limited by an 'actions' meter and for an application that is not mature by any means.
If you adjust the pricing and address some features it could be a good application though.