Pushbullet launches $5/month premium plan, starts charging for some existing free features

Pushbullet, a startup that wants to make it easy to transfer information between devices, has finally revealed how it plans to make money — with a premium Pro plan.

Founded out of San Francisco in 2013, Pushbullet offers apps across most major platforms, and lets you send links, photos, and other files speedily between your computer and smartphone. It can also sync up your (Android) notifications so you can read and reply to text messages directly from your laptop. The company has raised around $1.5 million in seed funding to date, and has some notable investors, including Y Combinator and Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian.

So far, Pushbullet has been focusing on increasing its user base, with “millions” of people signed up.  Now that it’s come time to monetize, however, it isn’t hugely surprising that the company is turning to the freemium model favored by many other productivity startups, like Evernote and Dropbox.

“Pushbullet makes money by offering features worth paying for,” said Pushbullet cofounder and chief executive Ryan Oldenburg in a blog post. The new Pro plan will cost $5 per month or $40 per year ($3.33 per month, paid up front).

While there are some new features available only to paying subscribers, Pushbullet has also chosen to remove some of the features from the free account, effectively forcing existing users to upgrade if they wish to continue using the service as they did before. This could prove unpopular — by all means introduce new “premium” features to the mix, but cutting into the current offering may alienate users who have grown to depend on certain functions.

In August last year, for example, Pushbullet introduced a useful universal copy & paste feature, meaning you could copy something on one device and access it instantly on another device. This will now be a Pro feature, as will mirrored notification action support.

Other benefits of a Pro plan include 100GB of cloud storage space (compared to 2GB), the ability to send files of up to 1GB, and unlimited messaging.

Above: Pushbullet: Plans Compared

There is little question that Pushbullet has proven its credentials — it has built a solid, useful, user-friendly service that works across many platforms. Its challenge was always going to be about how to make money.

“We could have kept Pushbullet completely free, following the path of many free services by showing ads and selling data to make money,” said Oldenburg. “We don’t want to do that. We never want to hurt the Pushbullet experience with ads or betray your trust by selling your data. Since Pushbullet must support itself, we want to do that by having you as our customer.

You can continue using Pushbullet in its current form for free until December 1, after which all features that need a Pro account will no longer work.