Tech News Source

UserVoice is a web startup that let’s you find out exactly what your users really want by allowing them to make suggestions, and then letting other users vote on those suggestions. If you have a company, product, project or blog and would like to get ideas and suggestions from your users then all you have to do is create a UserVoice page.

Right now UserVoice is completely free while in public beta, and creating a page will only take a few minutes. After the page has been created your users can go there and make suggestions and vote on other suggestions. Obviously, the more votes a suggestion has the higher up it will be on the page. As the page owner you can “provide an official response, mark an idea as ‘planned’ or clarify the idea with the users that asked for it.” Also, you can implement those ideas and “Push out new features that your users wanted. Collect fan mail.”

I think UserVoice is a great start-up for the simple fact that it makes it very easy for site owners to easily find out what their users/readers want. There are other means for site owners to communicate with their users, but having a page dedicated to this communication, in my opinion, makes it easier for both the site owner and the user. Once I get a larger reader base I will definitely consider creating a UserVoice page.

What do you guys think? Would it be beneficial to have a UserVoice page? (I am talking to both my readers and those of you who have your own site)

*UPDATED*

Here is the e-mail that I sent UserVoice to answer a couple of questions that you guys, and myself, had:

Hi, my name is Jonathon and I am the owner of Tech News Source, http://technewssource.net . I published a post today about UserVoice and it sparked a good deal of interest with my readers. I have a couple of questions that I hope you guys can provide answers to so that I can let my readers know.

1.) Will those who use the public beta for free have to pay if the final version is not Free?
2.) What will determine if the final version is free or not, and if not then what would be a ballpark figure?

Thanks for your time and hopefully you guys will be able to answer these questions.

And here was their response, which I thought answered those questions in great detail:

Thank you for posting a write-up about UserVoice as well as inquiring about pricing. As with most web applications, we feel that one vital component of our existence is to give back to the community - so there will always be a “free” base version of UserVoice. This version will handle most individual, non-profit and micro business owners needs quite handily. While we have not established what the change-over point might be for free vs. paid level (custom CSS, Domain Aliasing, max # of users, etc), we will work with our current customers to evaluate what makes the most reasonable sense. A starting point will more than likely be around $24/mo or less.

Our intention is to create a freemium service model that follows other popular web app subscriptions (like Basecamp, Freshbooks, etc.) - our pricing will be competitive with other services in our market. Additionally, we’ll be offering members of our public beta some sort of discount when we exit this beta stage.

Thanks again for checking out UserVoice - Hope that helps explains things.
If you have a more specific need, please don’t hesitate to ask.
–
Marcus Nelson
UserVoice.com - What do users really want?

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