Loudtalks is now Zello. As explained in Hello, Zello, we revamped everything including the products and pricing.

Here we share why a few product alignment changes .

Here’s the product lineup.

Here’s the pricing changes.

Why Change

To build a global brand and support the promise of a new social network, consumer apps need to be great, simple and free. To give simple names to volume products, we dumped “Lite.”

Our core revenue model is subscription service for businesses. Professional organizations often need management, security and support for their core communications. They often have specialized devices and need to integrate them into their work-flow applications. The value proposition is high quality team communication for less money.

We raised prices for business customers to create enough revenue to satisfy their needs. The system remains inexpensive when you combine automatic setup, administration and the purchasing of both Zello and seats.

We removed Windows Mobile from the consumer product line because consumers no longer use Windows Mobile. Yet, Windows Mobile remains popular with specialized rugged devices like those from Intermec and Motorola.

We raised the entry cost of the server license model because our sales and support costs are much higher than with the subscription service. It turned out many customers purchasing the license expect higher reliability and better management. But, reality did not agree. Internally hosted versions are always less reliable because of mistakes in setup, firewalls and configuration.

We considered killing the enterprise server to focus exclusively on subscription. However, there are enough organizations with hard requirements that don’t have Internet access, such as the military, public safety, prisons and trade shows.

What’s Next

We’ve invested in a new subscription billing platform with Zuora, which is currently live for a few customers. The platform lets us do a better job with regional pricing, and experiment with promotions and price testing. It’ll also allow us to provide more powerful billing options to our resellers and partners, two essential players in the ecosystem.