Earlier today DomainTools announced an evolution of our membership model for individual users. Going forward DomainTools will only offer one retail membership level, the Personal Membership.
I appreciate all of the feedback that we have received from many of our loyal and longtime DomainTools users. It’s clear DomainTools is a critical resource for our customers.
For 15 years DomainTools has been the leader in Whois and DNS data for a wide variety of customers: webmasters, domain professionals, attorneys, brand managers, investigators, cybersecurity professionals, journalists, researchers and many more. Over that time we have evolved the individual membership levels a number of times, but never asked any legacy customer to change either their price or package allotment.
Customers that have been watching the evolution of our website and public persona will know that in the last three years we have executed a pretty strong pivot towards building tools for enterprise-class threat intelligence enrichment within cybersecurity and incident response environments within organizations worldwide.
As the growth of our enterprise business consumed our focus and resources, we were forced to make some very difficult decisions, including how to streamline our legacy retail business in order to be able to continue to support it with the industry’s best data and toolsets. The Personal Membership level was designed to capture most of the product usage bell curve for our retail members, with only very heavy users falling outside the new boundaries. As with everything, I know we will miss the mark for some longtime users. It’s a unique irony that increasing our monthly price by $5 per year would likely have been better for our reputation than grandfathering tens of thousands of great customers until this one-time membership redesign in 2016.
DomainTools mission today is to continue to develop an invaluable service for cybersecurity teams worldwide who come to work every day on the right side of a very nefarious and rapidly evolving battle that affects all of us. The work we do gets built into the increasingly powerful and expansive products available to our individual users. Many of our users have told us their membership with DomainTools is worth orders of magnitude more than $99/month, but for others it is clear we have to earn that price point. And that’s what we’re going to do.
