Last week I’ve published an article about 10 awesome new public packs, which have been created shortly after we’ve launched the pro membership. The feedback for that article and the awesomeness of the public packs you guys already created left no choice but to come up with a pack gallery.

So here it is: http://zootool.com/packs

We will add more packs to the gallery over time. So if you got suggestions, which packs we definitely should include, just let us know!

First of all we want to thank all users who signed up for a PRO Membership so far. We got so many positive feedback for it and the last weeks couldn’t have been more motivating for us!

When we started thinking about the pricing model, we always had something in mind like the $24 per year for Flickr or the $19 per year for Dribbble PRO. We wanted it to be easy. We didn’t want to offer a silver, bronze, gold, platinum, diamond, super-beautiful diamond with whipped cream on top of it plan.

But it was super difficult to come up with a final amount for it. Will people pay $19 or even $24 per year? Would some of them pay more? What if we set the amount to $24 but nobody signs up for it?

Let’s be honest. 60,000 users is not Flickr – it’s not even close!! We are still tiny and we are proud of it! And let’s be honest once more: the total amount of users is meaningless. The count of active users is what it is all about and we got about 6k active users. I hear people say “That’s only 10% active users, why are you still running this?” — because we love it, because we’ve got plenty of awesome plans for it, because there are 6k users who count on Zootool and because being tiny is awesome!

The web has become a place where only big numbers are relevant (*cough* bubble *cough*) but being tiny allows us to run Zootool for almost four years in a row as a side project without any problems. We’ve all got great jobs, so we don’t need Zootool to generate any extra money. We’ve got low hosting costs, so our ads pretty much pay our bills. We don’t have a big shiny office. We don’t have company cars. We’ve got 100% freedom to run Zootool the way we love it.

With that in mind, we finally ditched the plan to have a fixed price for our PRO Membership and went for an (almost) completely free pricing model. Letting users choose between $1 and $100 per year means that everyone should be able to find the perfect price.

We hoped for about 100 paying users in the first month and we got no idea how much they would pay. Germans are pessimists and Nicolas told me that French are pessimists too, so those were pretty low expectations. On the other hand you won’t be disappointed that way :)

Actually we reached 100 paying users within the first two hours and after the first day we had 270 new pro users paying about $3000. Right now – two and a half weeks later – we got 456 pro users who paid $4140. That is an average of about $9 per account per year.

We were absolutely mind-blown by this!! $9 might sound pretty low, but it’s actually not. We’ve got 126 users, who paid $1 and 145 users who paid something between $2 and $5. This means that 59% of our pro users paid $5 or less. But the other 184 users (41%) paid $3329! So actually 41% or our users paid an average of 18$.

Is this a bad thing? No, it’s not!! It really shows that we are going the right way. We are pretty sure that everyone who spent $5 or less would have never signed up for Zootool PRO at all if we would have charged $20 or more.

A lot of users are giving the PRO features a try for a small amount to see if they are worth it at all, which is absolutely cool. A lot of users simply can’t afford to pay more and it’s so awesome to see that they still want to support us. And some users even just signed up, because they liked our pricing model so much – how great is that?

On the other hand we were so happy to see some of our big supporters, who paid much more than we’d ever expected. This means the world to us and is a huge motivation boost.

Will we get rich with this? Definitely not! The additional money we generate with PRO accounts will entirely be spent for Zootool. It’s really all about being able to move on, making Zootool better and keep it running. A bookmark service is something, which people rely on and so our goal is to make it last.

We are very excited about the first two and a half weeks and we can’t wait for the coming months.

Thanks again for all your support. You guys rock!

Cheers,
Bastian, Habu, Nicolas

Beautiful typography pack by Jen Hawkyard

Great collection of portfolio sites by Andreas Isaak

Nice infographics pack by Philipp Oehrlein

A huge set of creative Ads by Christoffer Engström

Great set of nice user interface design by Nicolas Cormier

All about sports by Christoffer Engström

The must-see pack for all Camera lovers by Ryan Collins

A great pack of illustrations by Sascha Assbach

The hilarious Grandma Collection by Malaclypse

Awesome Airline inspiration pack by Cole Henley

If you want to start your own public packs and share great stuff with other users and your friends, you should now sign up for our Pro Membership.

Zootool Pro offers a whole set of new features, which will give you great new ways to add your favorite web stuff to your Zoo and share it with your friends. It’s not just for professionals or crazy web nerds like us, it’s basically for anybody who wants to supercharge their Zoo with handy features. That’s why we wanted to make it affordable and we think we found an awesome pricing model for it:

You set the price!!!

We are running Zootool for more than three years now with a tiny team and no funding. Our goal always has been, to make it pay itself. It’s about building the bookmark tool of our and your dreams and about being able to run it for years to come.

The new pro membership is meant to give us more freedom to build new stuff and being able to grow. At the same time it’s about giving you a great value for the price you pay.

We thought that you know best, which is the price you feel most happy with. Whether you decide to pay $1 for it or $100, you are supporting us and that’s awesome :)

We hope you like the new features and we are excited to hear your feedback!

Cheers,
Bastian, Habu, Nicolas

We’ve added a brand new list view, which makes it easier to browse your collection by title or url. Just shake your phone to switch from one view to the other. We hope you like it!! :)

To do this, simply go to the user profile page, scroll down and look for the “Report this user” link in the sidebar – right below the ads.

Single entries can still be flagged with the little “sad-face-icon”, which appears when you hover over an entry.

Please also check out our guidelines: http://zootool.com/guidelines

Thank you so much for your support!!

Today I want to lead you into the dark chambers of our content detection engine and tell you some more about, what you really can bookmark with Zootool.

Images

Our goal is not only to make it possible, to bookmark all kinds of image files from websites, but build smart detection for images from photo- and file-sharing sites. URLs of images from Flickr, Dribbble, FFFFOUND, CloudApp, Instagram and Twitpic, will automatically be detected and we gather tag suggestions, the correct title and the biggest possible thumbnail from their APIs for you.

See how an image looks inside the Zoo ›

Videos

Zootool can bookmark billions of videos from more than 30 video sites like Youtube, Vimeo, Blip, Flickr, Twitvid and many more (the full list will soon be available in our FAQ section).

When you bookmark a video from one of those sites, the video will automatically be embedded in your Zoo and you can play it there anytime. We also gather tags, the title and the best possible thumbnail from their APIs.

See how a video looks inside the Zoo ›

Documents

PDFs, word documents, text-, css- or javascript-files – they all are bookmarkable with Zootool and we try to provide the coolest possible preview for those. We use the Google Docs Preview to show PDFs in your Zoo for example or have a custom preview for css and javascript.

You can also bookmark presentations from Slideshare or documents from Scribd and Docstoc, which will be embedded right in your Zoo. You can even bookmark Wikipedia articles and we have a nice custom viewer for them as well.

See how a Slideshare presentation looks inside the Zoo ›
See how a Wikipedia article looks inside the Zoo ›
See how a PDF looks inside the Zoo ›

Websites

We can’t support every site and type of content – yet :) and so it will always be possible to save a simple bookmark to a plain old website or whatever you find and which is not recognized by Zootool. We do our best to provide as much information about those sites as well. We try to find the proper title, gather tag suggestions and automatically generate a screenshot of that site, so you will find it easier next time.

See how a Website looks inside the Zoo ›

Feeds

There are hundreds of awesome RSS-readers out there and Zootool does not want to replace them at all, but sometimes you need to bookmark a RSS-feed without adding it to your precious every-day-feed-collection – that’s where Zootool comes in handy. Whenever you bookmark a RSS-feed with Zootool it will be added to your Zoo with a stripped down viewer. So you will be able to read that feed without adding it to your feed reader.

See how a RSS-feed looks inside the Zoo ›

Help us make it better

We are always trying to make our content detection engine smarter and more powerful, so if you’ve got suggestions for great content, just let us know and we see what we can do. You can also help us make it better by reporting bugs. So next time you find a video, image or document, which does not get recognized correctly, please let us know: zoopport@gmail.com

Read Things you might not know about Zootool Part 1

Login to Google Reader and go to “Settings” > “Reader settings”

Choose the “Send To” tab. This is where you can setup all the services you want to be able to send links to.

Choose “Create a custom link” at the bottom of the page

Enter the following settings…

Name:
Zootool

URL:
http://zootool.com/post/?url=${url}&title=${title}&description=${source}

Icon URL:
http://zootool.com/apple-touch-icon.png

That’s it! Now save the settings and go back to your reader.

Click on the “Send to” button at the bottom of each feed item, if you want to save a link in your Zoo.

A far better way to browse and read your Google Reader feeds is Reeder for iPhone and iPad, which has built-in Zootool support. Make sure to check it out: http://reederapp.com/

The beta of Reeder for Mac is available here: http://madeatgloria.com/brewery

http://zootool.com/extensions/firefox/zootool.xpi

1. Taglists
I’ve added a list of the 20 most favorite tags to each profile page. You guys use tags like crazy and now everyone can see your most favorite public tags and filter your public items by those tags.

2. Commentlists
Profile pages now show the number of comments a user has posted. If you click on that number you will get to a list of items the user has commented on.

Here’s my comment list