Hi – I’m Jeff, one of the Poll Everywhere cofounders.

About a week ago, we developed a feature that archives results into a timeline instead of just clearing them away forever. We knew this would be especially useful for educators who would like to reuse their polls with multiple classes and yet retain the previous answers, or for measuring knowledge before-and-after. In the future, we’ll add the ability to visually compare these various runs of a poll on a graph.

We like educators for a variety of reasons, so in the past we’ve told teachers they can clear their results and reuse their polls with other classes. Technically, they have more than the 32 participants allowed on the free plan, but we decided to kind of look the other way mostly for mutual convenience.  One thing is certain, the more participants on any given question, the more you’re benefitting from our service.

In the process of preparing this results history / archival feature, we analyzed our usage and found that the users that do this can be REALLY expensive for us.

I know we’ve all been conditioned to expect a free product from every web company out there, but the trend is not going this way. More and more web companies are transitioning to a “30 day free trial” model.  We’ve considered it many times, because if the percentage of people who remain regular users and never actually upgrade continues, we might not be able to sustain the incredible cost of text messages for our many free users. It probably costs Google less than $1 per year to provide Gmail to one person. They advertise to you, which is something we will never do. You also can’t call or email anyone for help (sometimes if you pray and wait long enough, someone from Google might respond). In contrast, considering that we pay the mobile phone companies several cents for each text message, a disturbing proportion of free users (overwhelmingly educators) cost us over $50/user/year in texting fees, and that’s before we spend any time on customer support. Can you see why we’re on the fence regarding whether that’s really sustainable business?  The truth is that most free products that educators love do not have back end costs anywhere near ours. It’s something to really think about.

In fact, if you wonder why we have free K-12 plans at all, it’s because I was a high school teacher and CIO of a school district. I felt clickers were valuable but outrageously expensive. Sometimes I have to re-convince the other people here at Poll Everywhere to keep our free plan limits at 32 participants instead of say, 10. It doesn’t help my case when we see whining dramatics like this:

“This is so frustrating and upsetting. I am a teacher who JUST started using Poll Everywhere two weeks ago in my classroom after learning about it at a technology integration day. My students loved it the ONE time we used it, when Clear Results still worked. My district will NOT PURCHASE a membership; they don’t believe in supporting this sort of technology; we are on our own to find and use this stuff. Your rate for one teacher is MUCH TOO HIGH for me to pay out of my own pocket! How frustrating that I cannot compile results any longer without forking over such a steep fee. And to think that I was considering this to be a very advantageous tool to use in my classroom! I can use it but not compile results for separate classes. How unfair of you, and how greedy.”

“NOT PURCHASE” in capital letters? “Unfair” and “greedy”? Perhaps this was an emotionally driven response from a moment of frustration, but try purchasing the cheapest set of 32 clickers for $1500 out of your own pocket. By comparison, we’re currently priced at $129/year. In 11 years you break even, and your clickers won’t be getting any smarter during that time, but you’ll still be lugging them around and replacing their batteries. This is like lusting after a Ferrari while calling the $12,000 Kia makers “greedy.”  Be proactive, and start educating your district on the benefits of student response. Apply for a grant. Solicit parent or corporate sponsors. Or simply say, “It’s not as good as it used to be, but at least you provide something useful for free.” It’s time for a reality check, since we’re teetering on the brink of whether to provide any free service all. Web companies such as Blinksale, GoToMeeting, CrazyEgg, Jott, and many others have chosen to eliminate their free plans (or switch to free trials).

So let’s start over. First, we didn’t give you any notice that clearing polls was going premium. We didn’t grandfather any previous users. And most importantly, the inability to reset a poll turns out to be a major inconvenience to all users when they try it out for the first time, then want to reuse that poll to demo to others at their church or company.  Therefore, we’re turning “clear results” back on for all users. Also, we are keeping perpetually free plans for educators around, at least for now. We’re considering other EDU pricing models, and I know first hand how tight school technology budgets are.  When we announce new pricing, I hope we see you vote with your school budget wallets. Sorry for the flip-flopping. If you upgraded to either the $15/mo or $129/yr plan in the last week solely in order to regain the ability to clear polls, please email us and we’ll refund you.

We received a fair amount of feedback on our Get Satisfaction page (http://getsatisfaction.com/polleverywhere) and also via email. We do listen and respond to our customers — every inquiry that needs a response gets a response. Thank you to those who engaged us respectfully. We’re also wondering if you’d like a dedicated bulletin board style user forum on PollEverywhere.com. Please leave comments if you feel you’d use it more than you use our existing Get Satisfaction forum.

Also, we’d appreciate it if you’d leave some comments here and tell us what your other education software costs, and if you cover it out of pocket or your school pays for it.