Great service, but an insane white label price
The pros:
This is a great idea with a clever features. It's hard to not like it at first glance. They even have a community in Skool that seem great with an enthusiastic set of customers.
Reviews can be given as texts, videos etc. That's great too.
You can get your customers to share their reviews on a lot of platforms. I didn't count them, but it looked like 30+ sites.
Then the cons (sorry for that this appears to only be a lot of cons, but you have to be aware of this):
* Once you check their demo test, it's quite hard to get back to the main account. The UI is not 100% intuitive.
* Some currencies have the currency symbol after the amount, but you can't change that. It's always a prefix in Climbo. You can't even add a space between the currency symbol and the amount. Hard to read. So Norwegian krona will look like this: "kr99", not "99kr" or even better "99 kr". That will look weird to potential customers
On top of that, if you have international customers, you have to decide for ONE currency since that is associated with the setting of your account, not to what country your offer targets or what price plan you use.
* Pricing for Agency License:
This is probably the least thought-through pricing model that I have ever seen! It's a great service, but the pricing for Agency white label is ridiculously high and won't bring much money to the vendor anyway.
If they thought like this instead it would probably have given them a lot higher revenue:
The vendor wants $3,000 as a onetime fee or $1,000/year. They suggest a monthly price for subscription to the potential customers of $100. With their own example, you could potentially make $6,000/month after 12 months. After 6 months, with their example, you would make $3000/month.
The $3,000 LTD offer will definitely scare off most potential customers. My own guess is that they might get 20 ppl at the most to buy their LTD white labeled solution and those that they get will not have thought of the risks. If they get 20 businesses to signup for Agency white label LTD, that will bring the vendor $3,000 x 20 = $60,000 .
What-if they instead did like this: do what most AppSumo LTD white label SaaS and charge around $300 for the LTD, then they would probably attract around 1,000 customers of their LTD offer. This would give them (at $300 per customer) a total of $300,000 which would be far better for them too. Let's say then that for every new customer via the agency, they would charge a 10% revenue share per customer, which for the 1,000 white label customers and potentially 30 customers each on subscriptions to the service for $100/month, the vendor would make 1,000 x 30 x $100 * 10% = $300,000 / month for 1,000 Agencies charging $100/month to 30 customers each.
With a little bit more thinking than the ridiculously high (sorry!) pricing for just the white label LTD, they could make a LOT more on a reasonable pricing. $300,000 for the LTD and then $300,000/month for the 10% revenue share, instead of just $60,000 . So in a year, the vendor could make $300,000 + ($300,000 x 12 ) = $3,900,000 or 65 times more than the $3,000 white label LTD offer. Sorry, but their way of doing it is just really weird. No offense.
Add to that, the first time you login to the $49 LTD purchase, you are presented a 20% discount for the LTD white label. How am I supposed to even know that I would be interested in any upgrade that soon? Not even giving me 70h to decide is enough. I don't know if I can make any customers on the service. Adding such scarcity doesn't make any sense at all.
The whole setup is clearly not thought-through well. It's even worse than the Plai.io offer. However, these guys at Climbo seem a lot better as a company.
A few warnings:
1) It is possible to send SMSs from the platform, but sending SMSs to recipients in the US without pre-approval can cost you anything on average between $500 - $1,500 per message in fines. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) allows the FCC to impose fines of up to $1,000 per message. This amount can be tripled to $3,000 if the violation is deemed willful or knowing. That is surely risky business. I don't think that Climbo know this.
2) The Climbo SaaS is breaking the Google Reviews terms which states that there must be transparency in reviews. Google considers it a violation if a business only solicits reviews from satisfied customers and discourages negative ones and it goes against their transparency terms. It is not allowed to filter reviews like what is done with Climbo. I am not saying that it is not worth the risk, maybe it is. I still think that the service is great, but you should be aware of that if you buy their LTD white label plan for $3,000 , it might very well become so that you lose your investment if Google finds out.
Facebook, TrustPilot, TripAdvisor, Booking, AirBNB, Google Play, eBay and Capterra have similar terms, so it's in violation of their terms too (those are the ones I checked). It probably applies to all or most of the other integrated platforms too.
3) It is a bit weird that they don't block indexing in search engines of their "Leave a review" pages. The brands are shown there and it will be much easier for e.g. Google to find it. It will also be easier for other businesses to "steal" customers from there by offering a lower fee for the service to the company that asks for reviews.
What is interesting is that currently there are 896 such pages in Google's index, which could tell a lot of about the real number of customers. I must assume that the white label customers are not seen there. Still...
4) Several of their reference customers no longer/doesn't exist. Their websites are dead.
Still, despite of this review, I will keep the LTD offer. For $49 LTD it's an offer that is impossible to resist. I can offer it as a full service offer for a higher price thereby not suffering too much from the lack of white labeling, or I could use it for my own customers only.
Whether this will be a customer generator or not is yet to be seen. I sit on a database with 10 million local businesses in the US including their review statuses so I will make an attempt to see if I can make any money on a "pre-launch". A shown interest would be enough. If I can, then a $3,000 LTD white label purchase could be an option, but that won't happen within the 70h scarcity limit anyway. I will at least be aware of that all terms are broken with the Climbo service so in that case it will be a risk that I take.
For $49 it's a no-brainer to purchase it. Of course I give them high ratings. It's their decision to use whatever pricing model as they want. I just think that they should re-think their pricing strategy.
Giacomo_Climbo
May 9, 2024Thanks, axxies, for the valuable feedback.
Pricing: we charge a $2997 LTD simply because the value you'll find in the White-Label Plan is extremely higher than its cost. Please note that you have included emails, SMS, and automation which you usually have to pay externally when using other similar white-label solutions. So, instead of paying hundreds of dollars per month for using these features with external tools, in Climbo, you have everything included in a single LTD. Yes, we understand that $3K could be a high price, but if you do the maths you can understand that this price is justified: in the long term, with Climbo, you save money. Also, we want our clients to keep 100% of their reselling price, so we'll never get any commission.
1. SMS are sent via our own SMS service (clients will never get sued), where we do all the necessary controls to make sure no spam SMS is sent. In the US we have a deliverability rate of 97%.
2. Our system is compliant with Google policies. If the end customer clicks on 1-3 stars, he has the possibility to leave private feedback or, clicking on the button below the page, to leave the review publicly on Google or the other integrated platforms. So, unhappy customers are not forced to leave private feedback if their experience was negative, but can still leave a public review. This is 100% compliant with policies and not a review-gating system.
3. Currently we have +25,000 active review links. You see 896 pages in Google's index because we are hiding all of them, so soon you will see 0 review links indexed on Google.
4. Of course, when starting this as a new business line, you could win, or down the road, you could decide to focus on other business lines for your agency. What we are proud of is that we have a very engaged community of white-label partners, and every month we have positive feedback from Climbers getting concrete results reselling the software to their own clients.
Again, thank you for your review, we hope you can get value using AppSumo LTD, and one day you could become one of our white-label partners, as +900 other Climbers 💚