Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Jott is out of beta and here is what I have to say

Jott, that really great voice to text message and email transcription service recently announced that they are no longer in beta. And along with coming out of beta, Jott offers paid plans.

I've waited a few days to write this post so I could go through the stages of tragedy. I didn't want to write something when I was irrational. Lots of people seem pretty upset about it, based on the comments on other blogs. But really, the business of business is to make money. I did get used to using Jott for free. It stinks when something you've grown accustomed to changes, but really, for me, Jott is such an indispensible tool that I will keep using it.

The guys and gals at Jott did a great job of building a great tool. In fact, the other day, I was at a session and I signed up for 3 more. Before I had left the building, I Jotted my Google Calendar and didn't have to think about it any more. Last week, I had a project that was in the final stages of implementation and I used Jott to communicate to the people on the project team.

Jott provides such a flexible and convenient way to communicate. I can Tweet, send my self notes, blog, text my kids and wife, send emails to work mates and more. All this with the power of my voice!

Jott now offers 3 plans: a free ad-supported plan, a $3.95 and a $12.95 plan. They each have differing functionality in length of messages, how you can manage your Jotts, what other services you can link to and other devices. I was a little taken aback by the fact that the basic (paid) plan only had 15 second messages - but when I went through my Jotts, most of them were really short. There were only about two a month that were long - and these ones were really long and spanned mulitple Jotts already.

It would be nice if you could pay annually instead of monthly, which would probably drive the price a little lower, knowing the time value of money (MBA is paying off)! But that would probably scare off some people at the same time. My bet is that the payment terms will change somewhat in the near future. Pricing is always a difficult game and I can't imagine what kind of discussions they had about it.

Here is what Jott has to say about exiting beta.

LifeHacker had an article about alternatives, if you want to explore them, but as for me, I'm with Jott. None of those other services seem to have the integration with other services down as well as Jott does. Good people, great service and it helps me in my life.

This does beg an interesting question, which I have seen asked elsewhere: what will you do if your favorite web app starts to charge? Whats the value that you put on your productivity and convenience?

In the terms of Jott, its the price of a Grande Mocha. For that price, with the way I use Jott, it is well worth it.

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