jammr Forum

Phineas.Click
I don not like the policy to move Functions ( like downloading jam recordings ) that have previously been available in the free account to premium. This move will not convince me to move to Premium, because it makes me lose confidence in future decisions.

Losing functionality is unwelcome but it was always clearly stated on the pricing page.

The Premium features are those that cost the most money to operate. At some point jammr needs to charge for these features because I cannot keep personally funding everyone's jamming .

stefanha

Great thank you for that answer, the band will weigh whether $60/m among us is viable for our needs at this time (all our studios are closed!)

I see you guys taking a lot of heat from people, so I just wanted to throw my support the other way in that I for one completely understand the paid model and disagree that people are having functionality pulled from underneath them. I have had more success with Jammr than any other tool we've tried and $10/m is reasonable to be able to create private rooms and access recordings for all musicians involved in a project. It was a steal for free while that lasted and gave us time to get familiar with it. I do agree the timing stinks, but I suspect the timetable was set and possibly missed before the COVID crisis and I'm hopeful this isn't a money grab!

SkinnyVinny
However I would be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed that you chose to bring in the premium mode now, when so many musicians around the world are relying on the service as their primary means of playing with others.

Hi SkinnyVinny,
I didn't want to make the Premium announcement about my personal situation but I guess many people
will feel the same way that you do and that's understandable. I'll share the details and hope being
transparent helps.

The decision to launch Premium now was absolutely necessary in order to keep jammr going. Up until now
I funded jammr for over 8 years and developed it as a side-project as time permitted.

That is no longer sustainable due to the huge number of users that have joined. Since the lockdowns
began I have been working on it every day, including weekends. I have paid for more servers when the
existing one couldn't handle the load anymore. I spend hours every day answering emails and helping people
jam. I took a week off from my full-time job to keep jammr running when the servers and software were
breaking under the load - vacation time that I won't be able to spend with my family.

jammr needs to be bigger than just me now in order to host so many users. In order to do that it
needs financial footing. I had to choose between closing jammr to new users and launching premium
so that people can continue jamming together online. Closing it to new users would have been even less
helpful to musicians in lockdown.

Some people might suggest another direction. I could have raised money from investors so that in the
short term we could spend investors' money instead of income from customers. But investors expect a
return on their investment and I would be forced into business decisions that are not in the customers'
interest sooner or later - exactly what we're trying to avoid here.

Or you might say, “open source it”. The jammr client and session server have been open source from
the start and all the work I do on them is available to anyone (including potential competitors) because
I believe you should be able to modify and share software that runs on your devices. In fact running
an online jamming platform as an open source project was what I did before starting jammr. But I
found that most programmers don't want to dedicate their spare time to improving the code, they just
want to jam like everyone else . Also, open source doesn't solve the costs associated with running the
infrastructure.

So this is why I chose this direction. I know jammr still has a long way to go, I know the user
experience has been frustrating for some, I make mistakes, but I'm passionate about jamming
together online and I'm not doing this to make a quick buck (over 8 years later this is the first time anyone
has paid anything and it's being used to run and improve jammr). I'm lucky that andhai was willing
to take some of the customer support load off me in the past few weeks (his job is affected by the
pandemic and I'll need to start paying him for his time).

It's a frustrating time and I too would have liked to keep all features free longer, but I can't keep it free at
the current scale. I'm maxed out and jammr needs this to stay online.

What I want everyone to know:
1. You are welcome to use free accounts.
2. Please keep sharing your ideas, I read them and we can improve jammr together.
3. Thank you to everyone who has been supporting jammr, whether it's by spreading the word, helping new users, or purchasing Premium.

SkinnyVinny, going back to your specific idea, thank you for your suggestion. I will think through the
details of a few approaches that might help out those who are unable to afford Premium.

Boom, right on. Just goes to show that most people seem to equate technology efforts as somehow free of human “sweat equity”. Same with professional musicians, I suppose, like somehow playing a guitar on a stage and singing can't be equal parts work and fun at the same time.

I haven't coded in a while, but I'm keen to try to improve the metronome/MIDI clock output so that the electronic musicians out there can sync up their MIDI clocks.

Like the captain above, I won't claim to be a 10X coder but I'd love to see and contribute to the code base as able. I see there are some modules on github, maybe I can make heads or tails of it soon.

-J

>We are delighted to announce that jammr Premium is now available.

Sorry, I am not really delighted. Up to yesterday private sessions had been free.

aviad_heifetz
Please allow a 14 day trial period when one joins premium. One can have no idea how a private session will look like without trying it out.

Good point, thank you!

I was reflecting a bit about Jammr becoming premium for private sessions … Initially I thought, ok, i'll pay, why not, it's a good service and for a private channel I am willing to pay. What I did not think of, as it was mentioned earlier, is that all participants of a private channel need to pay.

I too am playing with a kind of “band” (always the same bunch of people) - now I have the problem that not all of them are willing to pay, but I want to play with them all together. The only solution is a public channel … So in the end I am the stupid guy who pays for being able to play in a private channel that no one wants to join. I don't think that this is a good way to motivate people to pay.

In my eyes it would make much more sense, and even bring more payable customers if only the host (initiator) of a private channels has to pay. Consider the conferencing tool Zoom for instance, if you want to get premium, only the host has to pay …

Just my thoughts

Edited cjacoby (April 17, 2020 10:55:07)

cjacoby
I was reflecting a bit about Jammr becoming premium for private sessions … Initially I thought, ok, i'll pay, why not, it's a good service and for a private channel I am willing to pay. What I did not think of, as it was mentioned earlier, is that all participants of a private channel need to pay.I too am playing with a kind of “band” (always the same bunch of people) - now I have the problem that not all of them are willing to pay, but I want to play with them all together. The only solution is a public channel … So in the end I am the stupid guy who pays for being able to play in a private channel that no one wants to join. I don't think that this is a good way to motivate people to pay.In my eyes it would make much more sense, and even bring more payable customers if only the host (initiator) of a private channels has to pay. Consider the conferencing tool Zoom for instance, if you want to get premium, only the host has to pay …Just my thoughts

Yeah, I agree.

I want this to work, I want to contribute to the source code too, and help people in the forums as much as possible.

And financially, I'm doing fine so far as my business is not affected so far by COVID – and I may just cough up the $9.99 a month to be a good sport about it – but yeah, there is really not a whole lot of tangible benefits to paying for this right now, in it's current form.

It's a chicken and egg problem: the devs gotta eat, they need cash to hire more devs to make it better, but right now it's a bit clumsy/limited to be a paying product.

I would happily fork over the premium fee a month if I could host private jams and invite free members.

Very disappointing to find that the beta version has just been flipped to paying. €9.99 is too much, I think you won’t have that many people willing to pay for this as the problem with latency has not been improved.