Question: New Pricing advice

SAML, Group permissions, Unlimited audit history (for security control) — Needed only in large companies. Where there are many departments, territorial division, etc.

The current tariffs are balanced:

I understand perfectly why there are restrictions on “Integrations” and “Rules” in the base tariffs. They create a constant load on the server’s capacity. Correspondingly, Fibery’s costs are rising.

Any “automation” in the tariff is an additional cost for paying for AWS services. And it does not depend on the number of users. Therefore, it is necessary to set restrictions on them.

Not satisfied with the restrictions? There is a “Company” tariff.

Hi Michael,
I find this confusing. In my opinion, there are 2 separate issues when considering a subscription, each with their own logic:

  • The number of features unlocked, which should clearly be proportional to the price / user (i.e. the more you pay per user, the more features you unlock)
  • The size of the team which will determine the total price

Your table mixes up this logic because you talk about team size in the headers, and features in the contents. This results in a lot of confusion.

Why would I need to be a Company with 30 people to unlock the full power of rules, reports and integrations ? I could be a freelance power-user (which I used to be for a long time) and still want all these features. Conversely, what if I own a mid-sized business with 80 employees but don’t need rules or integrations? Does this mean I can keep using Fibery for free?

It doesn’t make sense to me. This has been done thousands of time so I don’t think you need to reinvent the wheel here: just pick the pricing model of your favorite competitor.

Personally I’m a big fan of Podio and I find their pricing model fair and very straightforward, but obviously there are other options.

For me, the rules alone would be justification enough to go for a premium plan (what you call “Company”). But if you want to give people more incentive to upgrade, you could also limit the number of items stored to a few thousands, and notify users when they are nearing this limit. Podio does this and I found it to be very effective.

It still gives you plenty of time to experiment and start building your organization around a new tool, and at the same time it clearly signals that if you want to continue enjoying it then you should pay for it.

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Yes, I think there has been some confusion about the table :confused:
The proposal does not include any restrictions on user numbers.
The information in the first row is only supposed to represent the best guess for what size of company is likely to need each tier.


So, if you’re a team of 3 and you really want SAML, then you’re on the Company plan.
If you’re a team of 100 and can get by without Group permissions or Entity permissions, then you can use the Free plan (until you exceed the limits for reports/integration/rules etc.)

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Yes I guessed this is what you were going for, but I still think the headers are misleading. Plan names need to be simple : basic / advanced / premium or bronze / silver / gold, you get the idea. OR, you could keep the current names and make them consistent by limiting the max number of users for every plan. But in that case you’d need to unlock all the features from the get-go, otherwise it would be very unappealing to SMBs. Personally I’d go with the first solution.

I think it’s a bit weird that a multinational with thousands of users could use Fibery for free so long as they don’t need advanced features. Wouldn’t it make more sense to implement some kind of limit like a maximum number of items, or maximum number of users maybe?

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Titles in the table are kinda internal :slight_smile: They just show our logic and desires. Names can be changed, it is just a draft.

  • I don’t like users limitations, it is not a natural scheme to me. We have such plans now and as I mentioned initially there is a problem with price jump when you add +1 user on top of the limit. Almost nobody has this scheme, all our competitors don’t
  • I do like usage limitations, but it is not so easy to define, since usage patterns are different and Fibery is not aligned with customer’s business outcome. Fibery is more organizational tool.
  • And I’m not a fan of features diff, I don’t really like restrictive tools and all important features should be accessible in free edition.

As you see, there are many obstacles that should be resolved to get fair, sane, and viable for us pricing :slight_smile:

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I think the current and proposed pricing structure misses a major opportunity in paid personal use.

I think there is some magic around the $5/mo (yearly, $7/mo otherwise) price range you are missing. The way demand curves work, you could potentially make more money from a lower pricing tier because I believe there are far, far more people willing to pay $5/mo vs $10/mo. This psychology is also why I suggest pricing around your yearly rate, rather than the monthly one. You want to advertise the yearly rate at key price points, which brings people in, then they can choose whether to pay extra to not have a yearly payment up-front.

If I’m looking at using fibery for a side-business, or managing household tasks, etc I would just use the free version. I don’t see people paying $10/month/user for a little bit more capability they might not need anyways. I also think you’d just get people creating multiple workspaces/users to get around limits.

Instead, I would propose this framework:

  • Free Tier:
    • Unlimited read-only users (you can show value to external people, but you can’t actually collaborate with anyone, can’t use enterprisey integrations/features, and have limited resources).
    • Includes limitations on audit history, no per-entity permissions, etc as outlined
  • Personal Tier:
    • Same limitations as free tier, but you can add more than one user
    • $5/mo (yearly, $7/mo monthly) for each user
    • Opens up basic integrations (weather, calendar, etc). This could be included in the free tier as well
  • Professional Tier (your team tier)
    • $8/mo (yearly, $10/mo monthly) for each user
    • Opens up more integrations (github, etc)
  • Company Tier
    • $13/mo (yearly, $15/mo monthly) for each user
    • Opens up enterprisey-type integrations (zendesk, salesforce, etc)

I think the limitations outlined are reasonable, but think you are missing a stepping point up to the higher price. I do think the number of rules isn’t well correlated to the number of operations the rules execute, but understand limiting based on the number of executions or operations would sound complicated. I also would rather see a limitation on the specific integration-types, rather than the number of integrations. I think this would be a key differentiator to get the upgraded price for the companies willing to pay for it.

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We are making $1,200/month from Band tier now. For us it is close to zero in fact.

Well, $20 for a team of four is very different from $5/user and I wouldn’t say fibery is very approachable for personal use at the moment. I have a few services I sometimes use that I’m not 100% sold on I pay $5/mo for, but at $20/mo I’d need it to be making a significant contribution. The current pricing plus mediocre mobile usability is exactly why I haven’t purchased a team account at this point for personal use.

Our company at the moment has a team account, but you are getting $0/month from me personally at the moment. You could be getting $10/month (2 users at $5/mo) from me if it was possible, but at the moment it isn’t in either the current pricing or the proposed.

Fibery is free for 1 user now with almost no limitations.

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This is what I appreciate from Fibery. I have plenty of times to play around without the limit of number of records per table like Airtable. I think the Notion’s pricing scheme for free tier that Fibery currently applied is so generous for personal usage. It gives everyone a chance to try.

Then when you need to share and collaborate with more than 5 people, Personal Pro, Team and Corporate scheme jump in.

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Yes, but not 2 users. When I mean personal, I mean someone and their partner. Keeping track of recipes, meal plans, contacts, birthdays, home/personal improvement projects, etc. In your proposed framework, I could do that for free and would happily do so. I think you’d just end up with people finding ways to work within the bounds of the free tier, but not enough reason to upgrade to a paid plan, which is why I recommended the change around the integrations.

I think something the major players all have is pricing that supports going all-in with their product. People that start using it for personal reasons would be likely to recommend their use for work and people that use the tools at work can use them personally as well.

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It also depends on Fibery’s target. If they think Enterprise business will use Fibery, then I agree – let’s keep Company plan for such big amount of requests and high AWS load.

If you have two plans users limitation is not a problem. It’s simple. Free and Team. That’s it. As I said above, if you have Enterprise in your target – just add the third plan without direct pricing. Check Notion: Notion-Planauswahl: Free, Plus, Pro, Enterprise und KI. They have just the contact sales button for the Enterprise.

I would consider:

  • What are Fibery’s principle costs related to usage by its customers (i.e. what features, user actions, etc. use the most actual resources that have an associated real-world cost)?
  • What is the pricing for the tools most similar to Fibery (as a whole, not the many it replaces) and especially what price structure do they use?
  • What is the target market(s) and how confident are you of this assumption?
  • What pricing will the target market users accept? (the biggest unknown, though comparison pricing gives some ideas)

Obviously there is no direct way to satisfy all of these factors, to map them all to the same output figures and pricing formula and have it make equal sense for all factors.

It is also a challenge that Fibery is somewhat unique and potentially attempts to replace so many other products. Or least can be used to replace many others. Some of the products it can replace are quite expensive, others quite inexpensive. And since it is flexible, it is not like “modules” you can charge more for, aside from specific integrations. It is more quantity/resource or special features that you can use to differentiate (SAML, etc.).

My point is that pricing Fibery is understandably difficult. :sweat_smile:

If it costs little to let people use Fibery for free with an unlimited number of types, entities, etc., then let them. If it actually could cost the company notable resources if, say, 100k people started using Fibery for free (I know, right now you could only dream of such numbers, but let’s say big changes to make Fibery more intuitive are really successful :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:), then consider some high but useful limits there on the Free version. I know Notion tried this then abandoned it, but A: they are in hyper-growth mode and have tons of funding and B: their market is definitely different and their strategy too, they rely heavily on user-to-user promotion, aesthetics-driven marketing, etc. To enable these they needed no limits, I think, and could afford it (well, sort of - what about those performance problems? :thinking:) due to funding.

All that said, my particular take on it:

  • I agree with the basic free version limits, but suggest as above some possible resource-based limits as well (e.g. X number of max Entities or Types, etc.)
  • I like @rothnic 's idea of a cheap plan for personal use that removes some of those limits. Integrations still seems less important for these users, so limits on that are OK. Arguably rules and reports should maybe not be limited, though I know they become a perf issue, potentially. Limit on audit history makes some sense to me though.
  • I agree with simplification, and I think you should consider that true Enterprise-level user needs may not be so easily or fully met/satisfied by a “tier” for them. Many companies do “Enterprise: contact us” and probably for good reason and, after all, you are a “high touch” company by nature. This gives you a chance to figure out their needs, perhaps some sense of budgets, etc. If a 1000 person company is interested but does not want to pay $13,000/mo or even $8000/mo because many users will only e.g. occasionally edit data, but they need SAML, maybe you are willing to offer them $6k/mo for 1000 users, knowing their expected usage patterns. So you get a $6k/mo customer instead of a $0k/mo, because you were able to understand their large-scale needs and make a deal. Maybe?
  • Team tier looks good with 30 days audit history, but I disagree with rule limits, though again I understand it could be a resource issue. I think it would be better to not have such limits there, and instead do analytics to see how much people actually use. If many people actually use over 100, then maybe this is something you can (or even must) charge for, but if in practice most do not use 100 or more, then putting the limit there just turns people off for no good reason.
  • Limits on use of integrations is interesting, but I am not sure if the number of integrations is the right way to limit. If there are integrations that are with expensive products, you might consider those to be more “premium integrations” or something (find some way of framing it that feels right to you, if not “premium”). You might even just tack on extra monthly cost for some integrations, e.g. Hubspot which is an expensive and deep product, or JIRA.

The most intuitive pricing model to me would seem to be something like:
number of products replaced by Fibery x average price of products replaced x 0.5 or maybe just total cost of products replaced by Fibery x 0.5. I posted an example scenario on Twitter a while back where, with the existing pricing model, the company I am consulting with would have paid the same to use Fibery or their other tools, and since Fibery was not as good as their other tools in some respects, there was not a lot of incentive to move. Assuming the Team tier would work for them (I think it would), pricing under your originally-proposed model above would now be $160/mo, which is actually almost exactly my formula above (basically half the cost of the tools they might replace). So… that’s interesting. :smiley:

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I’m hoping you can rethink capping rules/automations. I understand that they may be quite resource intensive, but I think limits on rules will really stifle usability of the platform. I think Fibery is missing some built-in features (mostly to maintain flexibility and avoid making decisions for the users). But these are largely compensated for through automations. In fact, rules/automations are one the most frequently suggested workarounds from fibery team to issues users currently face. I feel that if limits are put in place for numbers of rules, then that would discourage users to try to find some creative ways of making the system work. Having said that, I actually wonder how many rules users have on average and per @Oshyan 's comments if making this a criteria in pricing is actually because of costs or a differentiator between tiers.

I am not that bothered by limits on integrations, but as Fibery aims to become more of a knowledge management platform and integration options expand, these might become more important for more users.

I know Fibery’s intent is not be a personal tool, but like some others here, I use fibery personally. I started out building out a workspace to roll out to my team but have since also built out a separate workspace for my own work and knowledge management. I do hope that you consider either providing a personal (1-2 user) tier or tailor one of the existing plans with those users in mind. I am not sure how personal users affect resource use, but it would be nice if those users didn’t have any limitations on reports and rules.

I think this is also a good point because the plans for the most part seem to be structured around features (or limitations to features) and less around the type of organization that would be using the system. @Chr1sG mentioned that naming is a work in progress.

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OK, we’ve decided to keep it simple so far and make this first step:

  1. Remove Band plan (keep current customers intact).
  2. Remove users limitation for Team plan.
  3. Change pricing for the Company plan (it will not affect current customers).

Next we will think about better Free plan and some limits that will align with our target customers and goals.

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is there still the difference between the creator and user? where users are free? How External users are handled when you share something?

I humbly suggest a free tier with team to collect people.
A price per user of 5-7€ (in Italy is maximum you can ask)
Guest usage with unlimited guests ( customers that want to see project progress)
And, because the real power of Fibery is in apps, a program to get money selling custom apps.
Thanks,
Mario

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18 posts were split to a new topic: Template marketplace

  • We don’t differentiate users, if you can login and do things in Fibery, it is paid user.
  • Read-only users will be free (but not implemented yet)
  • If you share something, this is not handled by Fibery users, no restrictions here.

I use for my work and home, I need unlimited rules.
I think that a pro plan with $3 per user is ok to me.

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