Stupeflix just shared two milestones with us: its video creation platform has surpassed the 10 million videos three years after launch and its developer API now features a “friendlier” business model. The French startup also proudly noted it powers apps for Samsung, Sprint, American Express, Coca-Cola, and Visa, among others.
The 50 percent price drop is the interesting part here. Stupeflix redesigned its API website, but more importantly tweaked its revenue stream. Instead of subscription plans, Stupeflix now offers a pay-as-you-go model with volume discounts.
To get started, developers need $300 and can make videos for $0.50 a minute. Prices go down automatically as usage grows. The lowest price is $0.10 a minute.
Stupeflix calculates that this is a halving of all its price tags compared to the previous model, but I would argue the more important part is that the pricing structure is now more fluid. “We want to make it easy for developers to start hacking, we don’t want them to think about when to switch plans as they grow, and more importantly we want to offer prices low enough that you’ll stay with us once your app reached millions of users” Francois Lagunas, cofounder and CTO of Stupeflix, said in a statement.
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For the uninitiated, Stupeflix offers a browser-based online video suite and a service to automate the creation of videos. It also features an API to automate the processing and generation of video content for third parties, allowing developers to quickly build experiences in which users instantly get a custom video: SMBs create video ads to tell their story, people get a video personalized with their Facebook photos and friends, students discover storytelling by crafting videos, and so on.
“We want to be the Twilio of video,” Jeff Boudier told The Next Web. “We built the fastest, most scalable PaaS to create videos on-demand, and now it’s 100x cheaper than Animoto for developers to get started.”
As my colleague Nick Summers points out: why the price drop now? Has user adoption slowed? Was the subscription model failing? Frankly, I think Stupeflix is still experimenting to figure out what works best.
Image credit: stock.xchng
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