Counter the counter — and pay monthly

Earlier this month we made countering show the terms before you answer. That covered the case where you are the one countering. The other direction was thinner. When we countered your offer, the email had exactly one link in it — review and accept — and if the number was not right, your options were to reply to the email in prose or to let it lapse.

The email now carries three answers, and the page behind it does the rest.

Three answers in the email

Review and accept is unchanged. It is the same signed link to the same checkout page, and the deal proceeds as before.

Make a counteroffer opens that page at a short form: an amount, an optional payment term, and an optional message. Submit it and your counter reaches us the same way a counter sent from our Telegram bot does. We answer by email, as we did the first time.

Decline opens the same page at a second form, with room for a reason if you want to give one. Declining closes the deal. We can still come back with a better number, and if we do, that arrives as a fresh counter with the same three answers.

There is no account to create and nothing to sign in to. The link in the email is the credential, as it always was.

Pay monthly instead

Most of our counters are a single price. A single price can be more than you wanted to pay at once and still be a number you would pay over time, and until now the email did not say that a plan was possible.

When we counter with a single price, the page now lists every standard term that qualifies at that price — what is due today, the monthly amount, and the total — and each one is a link. Pick a term and you continue to checkout on that plan. Nothing further is approved on our side, because nothing has changed on our side: the price is the one we named, and a plan at that price is a way of paying it, not a new offer.

The plan link expires when the counter link expires. It does not extend the deal, and it does not carry a down payment or a shape we did not offer. If you would rather pay less over more months than the standard terms allow, that is what the counteroffer form is for — it takes a term as well as an amount.

A counter that is already a payment plan shows no extra rows. It is already the thing the rows would offer.

Two things that did not change

A counter link answers exactly one counter. If we send you a newer one before you reply, the older link's forms refuse with a plain message telling you to check your email for the newer figure, so you cannot accidentally answer a number we have already replaced.

And when you counter back, our side sees it exactly as it sees any other counter: the amount, the term you chose, your message if you left one, and the plan the deal carries. We are still the ones deciding; the difference is that you no longer have to write a paragraph to ask.

On Telegram

If your offer came through our Telegram bot, the counter message there already had a Counter button. It now has Decline too, and it does the same thing as the email's: it closes the deal and tells us why, if you said.

None of this changes a price or a term. It gives the second half of a negotiation the same three moves the first half has had all along.

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