Hello OC-friends!
However Open Classifieds was already founded in 2008, as a personal project of Chema (founder and owner), it has been the past few years that the company has professionalized itself. Open Classifieds has grown very fast and we are serving more customers than ever. Of course we are very happy about this development, but it also made us realize that the company needs a revenue model in order to be able to keep up the work that we are doing in a good way.
Free Open Source
The fact that we are offering Free Open Source software is very important to us. We value it that everyone has access to the source code of our product to see how the software works. Next to that we also appreciate it a lot when people want to contribute to the development and we of course will give credit to those who deserve it in the README.md of the installs. We will definitely not change this and continue to provide our classifieds script for free as open source.
As said before, the company is growing fast and in order to be able to finance this development, we need more revenues. In 2010 we started offering the first professional support, that could be bought as a premium product. This service was mainly focused on people with less technical knowledge and for those who appreciated some help with installing the software, make custom changes and fix different kind of problems. Next to that we started with the sale of the first premium themes.
Developments
The past years we continued with this development. We made more premium themes, providing customers with more and better possibilities to build a classifieds website that fits their needs and wants. The Open Classifieds support team was expanded, to make sure we are able to give everyone the support he or she needs. This is done trough our forum and via a ticket system for people with the premium support product.
Furthermore we didn’t sit on our hands when it comes to developing new features. In 2010 we offered all basic features, like creating categories and locations, publishing new advertisements, etc. Over the years we have extended this collection of features to a very long list with all great modern features you can think of. To name some of them: social login, a very important feature as this way of registering for a website becomes very popular. Also mobile and responsive design is something that we spend a lot of resources on, as we think mobile is the future. Custom fields, which are especially developed for dedicated websites like a job board, car website or a marketplace for real estate. Of course there are many, many more features that have been developed and the list is continuing to grow. Check our feature page for a complete overview.
To be able to finance all these developments that we have done and are still doing, we had to increase our prices for the themes and support. We think our prices are still very fair for what we are offering. The creation of all these new themes, features and the support that we offer to our customers, unfortunately isn’t for free. With slightly higher prices we are able to increase our revenues and reinvest this money into the company to finance new themes and functionality to the Open Classifieds script. This helps us to continue what we are doing and provide a better, faster and more stable product.
Mobile Era
For the first part of 2015 we can say that we are very satisfied with our results. Although we have increased our prices, the sales have continued to grow. We think this shows that our customers value the product and prefer to pay a little more for getting a way better product. For the second part of 2015 we will continue to improve Open Classifieds and release more new features. We need to make some big steps as we are living in the mobile era. Therefore the focus will be on making our product ready for mobile. We will do this by launching a native iOS and Android app that will have the native look and feel. With this app you will be able to manage your classifieds site on your phone without any trouble. Next to that we will make sure that future developed features and themes are ready for mobile. Themes for example will be responsive, giving the user the best user experience possible independently on what device they are using.
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