How Is NetDivorce So Cheap?????
Low-cost divorce online in California
The number one question we’re asked by clients before they hire NetDivorce is not anything about their own cases, but whether NetDivorce is “for real” or “legit?” How can NetDivorce possibly offer a quality complete service at one half to one third the price of most other online providers? There must be something wrong! Right? When others are so much more expensive, there can’t be a low-cost divorce alternative in California! Right?
No! Many people naturally think that way because consumers have been trained in so many industries, including the field of law, to think that products and services should be reassuringly expensive. If it doesn’t cost a lot, it can’t be good. Nonsense!
NetDivorce’s flat-rate fee for uncontested divorce is $129. We provide a service that is of high quality and second to none. Our clients are often surprised by the quality and extent of our customer service.
Unlike other online divorce services, we don’t charge what we think is the highest fee the market will bear. Instead, we control our costs aggressively (see below). We know exactly what our costs are per case, and we add a reasonable profit to get to our low flat-rate fee. The result is that NetDivorce is very profitable even when we offer low-cost divorce. Of course, we are only profitable because we handle a high volume, but you want your divorce provider to handle a lot of cases.
NetDivorce’s pricing is a win-win situation. We stay in business to finish your case, and you benefit from a low-cost divorce service that takes full advantage of all the available economies of scale.
So if completecase.com, legalzoom.com, divorcewriter.com, 3stepdivorce.com and all the other nationwide “big boys” charge $300-750 for the exact same service NetDivorce provides, perhaps the question should not be why NetDivorce is so cheap but why are those other guys so expensive.
In any event, here’s why NetDivorce is so cheap:
We Don't Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising
This is the BIGGY! Most divorce consumers find an online divorce company to hire by going to google.com or using the default search engine (usually Google) built into their browsers. You punch in the search phrase, “online divorce” or “cheap divorce near me” or whatever and boom – there’s a search engine results page. On the Google search engine results page, the top 4 search results and the bottom 3 search results on each page are the paid ads. Those companies are paying Google for Pay Per Click. Those companies bid against each other for the 7 ad spots on that first search results page because they know that divorce consumers are very likely going to hire someone on that top page. It’s expensive real estate and you, as a wise divorce consumer, need to know about it.At this writing, the bid required to get onto the first page for the search phrase “online divorce” is about $9. If an online divorce company using Google’s Pay Per Click bidding gets one paying client from every 20 clicks, they are doing well. The results of most companies are not that good. So if you search for “online divorce” and then click on one of the ads i and then you hire one of the top 4 or bottom 3 online divorce companies on that first page, you just paid approximately $9 X 20 clicks = $180 to Google, and Google doesn’t even handle divorce!! You thought Google search was free, right? Nothing’s free at Google Pay Per Click. You just hired a company that has to charge you $180 to pay Google for your business before they even make $1 in profit. How smart is that – for them and you? And the company didn’t pay that money. YOU DID!! You paid it in higher fees. That’s why completecase.com charges $300 for the exact same service for which NetDivorce charges $129.NetDivorce’s case acquisition cost is ZERO. We pay nothing to get cases. How do we do that? We use ONLY what is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – a wide range of fairly complex and time-consuming organic practices that enhance our ability to get our unpaid ad on that top search results page somewhere in between the top 4 and the bottom 3. In other words, by spending a lot of time to make good videos and write high-quality interesting articles containing information divorce consumers want to know and will spend time reading, we EARN our position on page 1. We don’t buy our position. We earn it. And it costs nothing if you handle your SEO in-house, which we do. And we’re very good at it. You will never see our ads in the top 4 or the bottom 3. You will usually see our ad somewhere in the middle of that search engine results page.So don’t hire a company dumb enough and lazy enough to play the Pay Per Click game. They play. You pay. Hire someone from that middle section on the Google search engine page – below the top 4 and above the bottom 3. They earned that position, and they’ve earned your business.NetDivorce and completecase.com make about the same profit per case – about $120. NetDivorce charges $129. Completecase,com charges $300. Same profit. Hire someone smarter from the SEO section of the search results page and don’t pay for their case-acquisition cost!!
We're Only On the Internet
We don’t have fancy downtown offices like we did in the ’80s and ’90s (when we were California Legal Assistance Centers – with offices in Riverside and Sacramento).Many other large “bricks and mortar” costs, such as postage, phone, office supplies and certain types of advertising, such as Yellow Pages, either no longer exist at all in our business model or are a fraction of what they used to be.In 1998, our Yellow Pages cost alone was $7000 per month (That’s over $21,000 in today’s dollars.)! Today our Yellow Pages cost is ZERO.Now, it’s true that there are certain Internet-based costs that didn’t used to exist at all, but they are very small per case compared to pre-Internet costs.We pass ALL of our cost reductions along to you. This is what the Internet was supposed to be! Remember?
We Use Our Own Divorce Software
We believe it to be the first divorce software ever written. Our founder wrote it in 1983-84.We’ve upgraded it constantly since 1984 and we converted it to the Internet in 1999. It’s good, and it costs us nothing.To write your own software from scratch now would cost you $10,000’s, and you’ve got to pay that development money to someone (bank, investors, programmers, etc.). If you rent or lease someone else’s software, which most of our competitors do, you’ve got to pay their development costs, their maintenance costs and their profits. In the end, the client always pays.At NetDivorce, no client EVER pays dime one for our excellent proprietary divorce software.
We Work at Home
Each of our staff works at his or her home.This not only makes us happier and more productive but also further reduces the costs of doing business (business clothes, gas, Starbucks, etc.). Again, we pass those savings along to the divorce consumer (you).What do you care that we’re sitting here in our shorts? We promise not to use webcams.
We're REALLY Good!!
We’ve been doing this since June 1, 1981. When you’ve been doing anything since June 1, 1981, you’re good at it.When you’re good at it, you don’t make (m)any mistakes. When you don’t make many mistakes, the time spent on each case is reduced. Time is money. We save money per case because we are so darn good!Again, we pass on those savings to the client. Most of our competitors can’t do that. All of our competitors don’t do that.
We Don't File Your Case For You
None of our online competitors file your case for you either (at least, NOT for their quoted fee), but they hide that fact like there’s something wrong with it. We don’t hide this. We shout it out!! This is a large cost saving we pass along to our clients. Our competitors don’t pass along the savings. They hush this up so that they can keep those substantial savings.In the ’80s and ’90s, we charged an average of $250 per case in those pre-Internet days. That was cheap then! We ran 4 or 5 full-time court runners in Southern California only. We know that it cost us between $30 and $60 per court filing circa 1990 (depending on the court and the number of cases filed each day) and that the average case had either 2 or 3 filings.We don’t do that anymore because it is not smart to double your cost when we have reduced your cost in other areas. We now consider that the cost of court filing should not be mandatory for the client (you). It should be optional. So when we subtract an average court filing cost of $90 per case from $250 and then subtract all of the other costs savings listed above, the answer in today’s money is $129.Don’t worry! If you really can’t make it to your local court to file your case (it’s easy) or you just don’t want to, NetDivorce works with the best same-day court filers statewide. Also, more courts are now offering e-filing for divorce. You simply upload your documents to their site and they take care of the rest. The filing cost starts at $75 per physical filing (but can be as high as $150, depending on the number of documents involved) and you’d need to pay them that fee twice during most cases. So you could add about $200 to your overall cost if YOU want to do so. Your choice.And remember, none of our online competitors file your documents at court for you either (at east, not for their quoted fee), even though most of them charge two or three times what we charge.
So yes, we are cheap – compared to our competitors. In fact, WE ARE PROUDLY CHEAP! But when you stop and think about the above, it kinda makes sense that we are cheap. Now you know why we are cheap. What you might want to think about is why we are the only cheap!
