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I love to tinker with all sorts of hosted applications: audio editing, video editing, content management tools, and so on. It used to be that in order to use these types of media tools you’d have to spend egregious amounts of money and install these applications on your PC. With the proliferation of high speed internet access and more efficient software development, resources spring up all the time as hosted services online.[more…]

Many of these services are relatively affordable and bill you either annually or monthly for access. As I mentioned  I love to tinker, and sometimes in order to get full access to a tool, you need to pay, of course, for the service. My wife will look over monthly bills and ask me, “What’s that? Do you use that?”. I try to be a bit more proactive at ensuring that I keep tabs on tools I use regularly and cancel those that I just can’t justify. Which brings me to a situation recently that just took me aback by it’s brilliance and simplicity.

I use a tool called Animoto for short video projects. It’s a fantastic tool that I use regularly but it has some limitations. I began to look at alternatives and came across a competitor, Stupeflix. Stupeflix offers essentially the same service, but with it’s own set of differentiators. I had a project to complete where Animoto couldn’t quite accomplish what I needed to do, so I signed up for Stupeflix and it did exactly what I needed for this project.

As the month was coming to a close  I received an email from Stupeflix. I anticipated the email was either a marketing email or an automatic billing receipt letting me know I had already been charged for the next month. What I got shocked me. It was an email letting me know that my month use was coming to an end and a reminder that I’d soon be charged should I want to continue with my paid account. I can’t recall the last time I received an email from a vendor letting me that the service was close to being billed and alerting me that I could opt out before getting charged again. To me, that was pure marketing/business genius.

I did cancel my paid account… for now. Once Stupeflix’s offerings come up more evenly with what my current needs are with Animoto, I’m certain to switch over.