An Engineer

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new tier of Phanfare service priced at $29/year. This level of service, which we just call Phanfare, offers the same great photo and video hosting with musical slideshows, your own URL at phanfare.com and awesome mobile support.

The difference is that the $29/year version does not retain fullsize originals. We have spoken to many customers since we raised our prices last June who tell us that they love Phanfare hosting, but they don’t need us to be a backup of originals.

Good design is about keeping a product as simple as possible while still fulfilling the vision. When we set out to design this new level of service, we thought about what was essentially needed to allow our customers to beautifully tell their story through photos and videos.

To that end, we have removed cnames, album sections, dropbox and multiple subsites. While all these features are cool (and remain in Phanfare Premium and Pro), they complicate the product. We want the $29/year version to be drop dead simple for our customers to use and enjoy. We want to lower the cognitive load of being being a Phanfare customer.

To the eye, the new $29 Phanfare level of service looks nearly the same on the web as the $99 Premium and $199 pro version. The difference is that we don’t store your originals. Also, video is standard def versus HD, but the reality is that many viewers don’t have sufficient bandwidth to stream HD video over the web anyway.

However, we do store your images and videos at Amazon S3, ultra reliable online storage. And although we don’t retain originals, we keep high resolution images that should display well on the web.

We hope you like this new more affordable version of Phanfare. It should make the Phanfare experience accessible to a wider audience.

A note to our existing customers: we did not build a path to downgrade from Phanfare premium to this new $29/year level of service. It’s not a trivial to build. The downgrade would involve removing your originals and removing some features from your account. Let us know if you want to downgrade to the new $29 version. If enough people want it, we will build the conduit.