Welcome, Professional Edition
The story behind the scenes
The free Community Edition
What's next
Welcome, Visual SEO Studio Professional Edition
Now along with the free Community Edition comes a full fledged commercial product:
Visual SEO Studio Professional Edition.
Finally out of the beta stage, with increased stability and full support for modern TLS protocols, the SEO tool will assist SEO Pros and Agencies with in-depth analysis of their clients' websites.
You can know more details about how to purchase a yearly software licence consulting the Pricing and Get a Licence pages.
This is an important milestone for the future of the project. After 3 ½ years we will start to monetize to be able investing more. We have a huge list of features and improvements to work on. Some of them are already under heavy development since time.
The story behind the scenes
You might have noticed it's nearly two months we are not publishing updated. We put everything on hold (usual fixes apart, we alway take care of them) to prepare the infrastructure for a paid version.
It's not much about changes to the product itself:
we built from scratch a system to accept payments via Credit Card (and, soon available, via PayPal) thanks to our gateway payments partner BrainTree; we built from scratch a complete invoicing system; we went through all the ins and outs of European and Italian legislation about invoicing and taxing for all the possible cases (B2B and B2C, Italy, Intra-UE, Extra-UE). Even getting the correct pieces of information took a tremendous amount of time and energies inquiring the Tax Agency digging for knowledge that looked very sparse.
This is an important moment on the personal side as well:
one year ago I left my daily job with a secure salary to become an entrepreneur and chase a life dream: build a software house.
One year without salary, refusing any gig that would take my focus off the project.
We already have many thousands of (non paying) users, loads of positive feedback... yet what my team and I did so far was "packaging". Now it's time to "deliver". It's time to demonstrate we built a sustainable business. Time to grow up.
Some users might be disappointed the full Professional version will no longer be free (as it used to be upon registration while in beta stage). I see it as a good thing for both sides: having an income will permit us to provide a better service and technical support, to further develop the product. Some features we have planned could not be implemented without some investment. We are extremely excited for the possibilities this important milestone opens.
The free Community Edition
There also is the Community Edition. It's completely free, no registration required, and can be used for commercial purposes.
With some limitations compared to the Professional Edition (most notably, the number of URLs you can crawl), it is meant to be a good fit for non-professional users.
You can read on the two Editions differences on this page.
Conclusions, and what's next
Yes, this time I indulged a little on the personal side. I worked so much on the product I nearly come to identify myself with it!
What excites me most is being able to get back on track with product features development.
The roadmap is laid, there are so many cool features queuing to be published.
Before this forced pause to build the necessary backend infrastructure, we have been able to release a product update every three weeks; we plan to continue publishing with that frequence.
Version 1.1 is also an important release in terms of stability fixes and extended support to most modern TLS security protocols. For the complete boring changes list, read the Release Notes.
You might have noticed we renewed the product logo (we absolutely love it!) and - partially - the web site theme. We still are in the process of a wider review of the entire coordinated graphic, product included. You will see more in the near future.
Now, time to go back to SEO site auditing.
Go ahead, launch Visual SEO Studio 1.1 Professional Edition!