Earlier this month, we updated our pricing model to a per user, per month offering to better reflect the needs of our customers.
Up until this point, our monthly and annual subscription options were based on the number of Slack users in a company’s workspace. For example, if a company had 250 users in their Slack workspace, they fell into a particular pricing tier.
The decision to modify the subscription model was based on a number of factors.
- We want to simplify the model to avoid confusion and misinterpretation
- We felt we needed to adapt to the reality that employee advocacy typically includes a smaller subset of people within an organization. As such…
- We want to be more fair to our customers and not overcharge them for services they’re not using.
- We want to be more fair to ourselves and not undercharge customers who are using our service.
- And we want to be on the right side of a growing trend (see below)
To be completely transparent, with our old model, there were many examples where we were the beneficiary – where you could argue we overcharged companies based on the number of actual users of our solution. Conversely, there were just as many examples where we undercharged companies for our service. This primarily occurred with larger enterprise customers who misinterpreted our subscription model and benefited from our emerging position in the market.
The new subscription model levels the playing field for customers big and small and does a better job of setting expectations for our service.
Please Share was designed to be accessible for all companies – the majority of our customers have less than 500 employees – and we want to be a fair partner.
So, going forward, Please Share customers will only be charged based on their usage as determined by the number of employees who have authenticated their Twitter or LinkedIn accounts through our service. Deactivated Slack users are automatically removed before the next billing cycle. With the pricing structure in place, a company with 25 authenticated users out of 100 employees will be charged the same as a company with 25 active users and 10,000 employees.
Lastly, we believe our pricing structure is part of a bigger trend that will ultimately become the standard model for all SaaS companies. We don’t claim to be trendsetters here – there are many solutions that have had a similar model in place for many years. But the reality is that there is excessive waste in the SaaS world.
For instance, I have a subscription to Adobe Illustrator where I pay ~$23 per month. This is a fair fee in my opinion, but not necessarily in months when I don’t even open the app. Ideally, in those months, you would think that Adobe wouldn’t charge me at all. Sure, you could argue that there are still overhead charges, but perhaps they could reduce their fee to $5.00 for those off months.
With AWS, GCP and Azure leading the way, companies are becoming accustomed to only paying for the services they use. We believe this will eventually trickle down to most SaaS offerings, including many B2C tools too.
Furthermore, chatting with a friend in Sales at a well-known West Coast startup, he’s already experiencing this firsthand. Where in the past, his company could charge a set price for, let's say 100 users, now customers are monitoring more closely and demanding that they only pay for users who accessed their service in the past month (i.e., 67 users in February).
With the advent of tools like Zylo, Zluri and Productiv, companies are getting smarter about their software spend. And with these recent updates, we want to be on the right side of this trend.
Lastly, for companies interested in annual pricing and/or volume discounts, we are happy to provide a quote. Just send us an email.
Update: As of April 1st, 2023, only "active" users will be included in monthly billing cycles. An active user is defined as someone who as taken at least one action in Please Share within the past 30 days, who has authenticated his or her LinkedIn or Twitter account, and who has an active Slack account within a companies Slack workspace. Annual billing options are available upon request.