Despite attempts to make things as clear as possible on our pricing page, MouseDining customer service agents continue to receive questions related to our subscription pricing such as:

“Which subscription should I choose?”
“What are the differences between subscriptions?”
“What are the benefits of subscribing?”
“Why do you offer paid subscriptions?”
“Why should I subscribe to MouseDining?”

While I’ll direct you back to our pricing page for a better understanding of what you receive with each of our various subscription plans, I’d like to address here WHY we we offer paid subscriptions and WHO should bother subscribing.

“Why do you offer paid subscriptions?”

The short answer is that texting costs a significant amount of money. Early on, MouseDining was free to use with no restrictions. This was fine when friends and family were primarily using the service; but word quickly spread and MouseDining grew at a tremendous rate over the Summer of 2016, specifically among travel agents.  In October of 2016, our monthly texting bill neared $1,000 and we were faced with a decision: shut the service down, remove texting as an alert method, or figure out a way to offset the expense going forward.

A brief survey to users explaining our dilemma revealed that they did not want to see the service go away; nor did they want to give up text alerts. This left us to figure out a way to offset the expense and resulted in the original $19.99 MouseDining Pro plan launched in January 2017. Besides adding limits to free users, MouseDining Pro allowed subscribers to add notes to their alerts – a feature particularly useful to travel agents.

MouseDining’s success brought several new growing pains; not to mention new expenses. During the summer of 2017, we saw a dramatic increase in the registrations of non-travel agents, or families. This explosive growth added tens of thousands of new accounts on our free tier and our hardware began showing signs of struggle – slow page load times and delayed text and email alerts were becoming common occurrences. We patched things together as best we could until we were forced to reengineer the service from the ground up. In late October we rolled out some backend changes that alleviated our hardware issues and set the stage for our new front-end launched shortly thereafter.

In January 2018 we revealed several new subscription plans that range from $5 to $20 monthly; each with an annual subscription at signifiant savings. This change was the result of necessity and user feedback. Necessity because international texts cost up to 10x more than domestic texts, and these were beginning to make up a significant portion of our expenses. User feedback helped us understand that $19.99 was a bit too costly for smaller travel agents and hard to justify as a family who preferred to dine multiple times throughout their Disney vacation. For this reason we added $5 and $10 plans, in addition to making MouseDining Pro an even $20.

So, the long answer is that MouseDining has ongoing, scaling expenses that must be covered to continue offering the service. Because we are now a paid service, we also have an obligation to maintain it professionally. As such, we’ve hired a staff that helps out when there are issues and is available for ongoing development as well as new features. Your paid subscription helps support these individuals and promote MouseDining’s ongoing development. So if MouseDining is something you enjoy and you’d like to see us continue development on this and other Disney-related applications, your subscription dollars support these efforts and are very much appreciated!

“Why subscribe to MouseDining?”

Despite the fact that every new user costs us money, not everyone needs (or wants) to pay for MouseDining’s services. We’ve adopted the “freemium” model made popular by many mobile applications and games where over 95% of users will use the service for free, while only the top 5% are paying users. As such, we limit the features free users have access to in order to manage our costs. Limiting features to free users simultaneously gives us an opportunity to market to potential paying users.

Continuing upon the example of freemium games, MouseDining aims to not be a “pay to win” application – meaning there are not many advantages paid users gain over that of a user who opts not to pay. There are some conveniences, yes, but as a free user you can accomplish the same thing a paid user can with just a little more time and management. For example, a free user gets alerts the same way paid users do; they just need to take an extra step and re-activate the alert if they were unsuccessful in landing the reservation. Paid users gain the auto-renew feature so the alerts just keep on coming.

So, who should subscribe to MouseDining? If you’re located outside the United States and prefer text alerts to email alerts, definitely consider upgrading to a paid subscription. If you’re looking to gain the conveniences of a paid subscription such as auto-renew, notes, or increased simultaneous alerts, you’re a great candidate for a paid subscription as well. However, if you’re neither of these but you value our service, you should subscribe to MouseDining as well. Why? Because you’re supporting the individuals who maintain the service and promote future development.

Thank you for your support of our services and we look forward to brining some new and exciting features to MouseDining by summer!

Cheers,
Dustin Checketts
President

One of the fun things we get to do here at MouseDining is observe how customers use our service. We measure the typical things most websites track through Google Analytics – things like unique users, sessions, page views, traffic sources, etc. We’ve also set up a few goals so we can see the number of new users, paid users, and how often alerts are being set.

Then we have a bunch of data in our database. Things like how many users we have, how many users have alerts set, how many alerts each user has set, which restaurants are the most popular, which dates are the most popular, which meals are the most popular, and which meal times are the most popular. There’s more, but we’ll just scratch the surface for now.

We use data like this to better understand how our users are collectively using MouseDining. We don’t often look at individual accounts unless something seems out of the norm; that, or someone contacts customer support in need of some help with their account.

Anyway, the reason I tell you all this is because I often come across articles like these: The Most Popular Disney World Restaurants (and Alternatives When They’re Full); Top 20 Disney World Restaurants; Top 10 Disney World Table Service Restaurants; and I think, “MouseDining has REAL data from REAL Disney travelers and these lists are so far off from what we’re seeing.” So I’m making a promise to our users that I will share what data I have so we can all educate one another.

Please do not take this as an attack on the publishers I’ve used as examples. Time passes, new restaurants open up, menus change. I don’t discount the value they’ve added to the overall Disney dining community. I will, however, invite and encourage any and all publishers to use MouseDining’s data as a source for future articles and content published on the topic of Disney dining. If there’s data you think we have that you’d like for your article, contact support and I’ll see your request. Our goal is to enlighten everyone in a positive way so we can all enjoy Disney’s fantastic dining experiences.

MouseDining’s list of Walt Disney World’s most popular restaurants as dictated by MouseDining users, and the percent of total alerts set – January 2018.

As you can see, Be Our Guest makes up nearly 50% of all alerts set by users on MouseDining.com. I wanted to include these percentages so you can see, relative to other restaurants, where the restaurant you seek stacks up.

Now don’t get discouraged thinking this accurately reflects the difficulty in landing a reservation. To measure difficulty, we would need more data, such as restaurant max occupancy, staff availability, average table turn, hours open, etc. Perhaps someday, but for today, this should be helpful, if not interesting to anyone using MouseDining.

I look forward to bringing more data like this to the entire Disney dining community in the future.

Cheers,
Dustin Checketts
President

We recently re-introduced the calendar back to MouseDining.com. It was a rough path to get it there. Here’s the history and detail of the changes.