Why aren’t you free anymore?
We are: Jott Basic is there and is a free offering! The premium accounts were added primarily for people who don’t want ads, or for those who need longer, more expensive transcription.

Why did you make your free offering useless by taking away email?
Jott Basic is still free and includes unlimited voice-to-text notes. You can view those notes online like many web apps, and we’ve added the new desktop app Jott Express (which works online and offline, syncs with the website and the Jott for iPhone app), and we still deliver Jotts in emails via the Daily Jott.

Here’s what the new Jott Express looks like:

These prices are outlandish, did you even think about them?
We thought about them for two years, and feel $3.95/month is a great value for everything that is provided. We were very honest from the get-go about charging once we were out of Beta and always having a free version and we have stuck to that promise. If you go out and do the comparisons of other companies that charge for transcription, you’ll see that we are actually VERY reasonably priced. It’s true that some of our competitors who are still in beta are still free, and though we can’t speak to any of their business models, at the end of the day they face the same cost realities that we do. $0.13/day is an extra expense, but it’s also a high value one that saves people from stress, lets them send hands-free messages, and keeps them organized.

Why don’t you have annual plans?
In part because we wanted people to be able to try the other services for a month, see what works for them, and then make a decision. Since the demand for this has been so high, it’s definitely something we’ve been considering adding in as a base offering as well. Realizing that our current customers would probably want an annual subscription we offered them just that with a pretty big discount- by entering in your phone number as the promo code you can get a year subscription of Jott at 26% percent off. For those who would like Jott Pro, enter your phone number with a plus sign (+) before it for the same 26% off.

Dear Jotters,

We reached an exciting milestone today: Jott has exited “beta”.

It’s a big deal for the Jott community because it means that together we’ve built a service that has great value. Despite being in the age of perpetual betas, we actually had a pretty clear plan for getting the service to this point: 1) Take the time to figure out what people really want; 2) Listen to how they would ideally want to pay for it; and 3) try to make 1 & 2 work!

We realized pretty early on that we had a product with broad uses, and it made answering the question “Who is your customer, and how do they use it?” very challenging. Initially Jotters were mostly cutting edge types who follow the tech blogs and the start up world. But pretty soon we saw lawyers, sales people, real estate agents, teachers – you name it.

From our earliest days we had “Jott Anywhere” as a mantra, and two new downloads finally get us there: Jott for Outlook, which lets you use Jott to create Tasks, Events and Email Drafts; and Jott Express, a sweet desktop manager for the Jotts you create anywhere.

Believe it or not, it’s not easy asking people for money, because people have different ways of valuing Jott, and we hate to disappoint anyone. A lawyer wrote me back in 2007 that while Jott had real economic value for him, it was the stress reduction he valued most. How do you put a price on that?

In the end, we’ve come up with a good mix – all based on actual usage data and your feedback. The $3.95 “Jott” plan (known internally as the Grande Mocha plan) is really designed for the average user: Notes, Reminders, all the Jott Links, and hands-free Email and Texting – and no advertising. There is a lot more detail at the Get Started page, so have a look.

Anyway, thanks to all of you for helping us get here. We have an amazingly talented and dedicated team here in Seattle and we couldn’t be more excited about Jott’s roadmap.

John

John Pollard, Founder and CEO

Hi all, we wanted to apologize for the difficulty some of you may be having logging in to your account and signing up for a plan. Last night when we changed the website over we encountered some server issues. We’ve been working around the clock to get everything back to normal and will update again as soon as we’re back to 100%.

From time to time we get questions about the url that appears when you use the Twitter Jott Link to post to Twitter with your voice. So what exactly is it? Simply a link to the audio file so your Twitter followers can listen to you Tweet. What are the pros of having this link? Well…

1) Your Twitter friends can hear excitement/disappointment/joy/sorrow in your voice.
2) You’ll be sure that sarcasm doesn’t get lost in text translation.
3) Sometimes the transcription isn’t perfect.