Readme

How Baremetrics helped cut revenue churn in half.

Baremetrics has played an important role in strategizing and monitoring the growth of ReadMe. But more recently, Baremetrics helped to make a very risky and difficult decision: retiring their most popular plan.

ReadMe is a scrappy team of five that have set out to change how we do API documentation. “No one likes writing documentation, and most people don’t like reading it either. So our goal is to make it a nice experience for both sides,” explains founder Greg Koberger. They have been a Baremetrics customer since the beginning–when they first started out, a friend of Greg sat him down and made him sign up for Baremetrics right on the spot.

Baremetrics has played an important role in strategizing and monitoring the growth of ReadMe.

Problem

The team at ReadMe has always had a self-described “love-hate relationship” with their lowest tier $14/mo Documentation plan.

The reason?** Folks on the lower tier plan had very different needs than the other plans**, creating distraction and a split in focus. But the most pressing problem: ballooning support costs that failed to payoff.

Solution

The Baremetrics Compare Plans feature drove home the need to make a change. The $14/mo. Documentation plan represented just 7% of revenue, but a whopping 31% of support requests. And because the needs of users on this plan were incompatible with those on higher plans, this loss leader wasn’t leading to significant conversions to the higher value plans.

So they axed the Documentation plan for new signups, and waited to see what would happen.

Outcome

In short, the outcome was better than anyone could have ever imagined. Revenue Churn decreased from 5.4% to 2.5%.

MRR growth remained the same, and support requests dropped from 25 per day to 15 per day.

This result meant happier, better supported customers, and a team freed up to work on more exciting opportunities. Win-win-win. ReadMe helps developers make beautiful documentation. You can read more about how they eliminated their cheapest plan on their blog. We also use ReadMe to power our slick help documentation.

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