I want to challenge you a bit on the price plan for external users.
Today you have a plan that goes from $8 to $0 based on the number of users.
In many cases, a user wants the opportunity to try the software before he/she buys it. It means that the developer of the software today has to pay from $8 for a trial customer, with a great risk of losing the money. If there is 1000 trial customers a month, then the developer of the software risks losing $8000 on the trial customers.
My suggestion is that you don't bill 8$ to $0 on new users until 15 days have passed. So that it is possible to delete the user after a 14-day trial.
It will open to have trial customers.
The other thing I want to challenge you on is that it is only paid for external customers that the developer of the software makes money from.
An example is: I create a customer portal where I show information about your purchases related to a store. We do not charge for showing this information to the customer. But it will cost us 8 to $0 based on the number of users per user to be able to display this information.
It could, for example, be solved by checking whether a transaction has been carried out on this customer and thus you also charge for the user.
I understand that you don't necessarily want to cover all the needs out there. But such a price plan would allow the solution to be used for more than just cases where an external user is charged. if you dont want to loose mush money.
Hi @Christian_Ostrem! Thanks for sharing this. We're open to any and all feedback and are constantly evaluating our pricing model for newer features, in particular. I'll be sure to share your thoughts with the team!
I agree with this and would like to bump this topic for reconsideration. I’m currently evaluating Retool, but the cost structure for external users makes it difficult to consider beyond internal tools. How does annual billing work when your user base fluctuates month to month? If you exceed the number of initially purchased licenses, you pay a prorated price for additional annual licenses that you're then stuck with for the rest of the term, even if the user only stays on for part of that time. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this means you're effectively paying for your peak number of active users throughout the year, right?
I pay for plenty of software licenses for internal users on that pricing model (Google Workspace, Dialpad, Missive), but none for external-facing users. You can avoid paying for peak annual active users by choosing monthly billing, but then it's $10/user. End-user pricing should be much cheaper and scalable (unless that's not your target audience). A sub-$1 monthly active user billing model for external users would be a much easier sell and make more sense for developers managing large numbers of users.
If the number of annual users exceeds your pre-paid for annual user count in any given month, then you will be charged overages for that single month at the monthly rate - there's no further commitment or proration for the rest of the year. This follows the same behavior as internal end users and standard users. Let me know if that makes sense!
