Use backpack

While it’s not for me in my present work/life situation, I can definitely see the value Backpack provides those who work as independent consultants/contractors, and small companies/teams (10-20 people) that don’t need or want to invest in an intranet/extranet. For a team, $19/month is a pretty good deal.

I still think the free and basic versions don’t offer enough. A trial of the Premium version would perhaps lure more paying customers.

After about 30 minutes of play time and a day of thinking I’m not sure this is for me. The number one barrier to entry is price. The free account is paltry: three pages of notes and lists is all you get. Emailing to-do’s to your list is very nice, but I can do a similar thing with Gmail if I really want to. Reminders are fine, but I’ve got a BlackBerry that does this for me already. I can’t keep my whole schedule in Backpack anyway, so there would be a bit of effort duplication on my part to take advantage of it.

When you upgrade to a paid plan, you can upload files and store images, but it doesn’t seem like a very good deal. $5/month gets you 25MB of storage space and 15 pages. That’s $60/year. Compare that to a Flickr Pro account where you can upload 2GB/month. The original Pro account cost a bit less than $50/year (pre-Yahoo!)

37signals looks to be targeting a niche audience of creative/developer-types who will pay good money for good-looking software that satisfies their compulsion to stay organized and get things done. And it is good-looking and very well executed. Kudos to them. They know how to make things work.

Received my golden ticket and I’m in! Tomorrow I will hit the trail and explore. Thanks 37signals.