So now, as a business with 10 users, I still have to decide if my 11th new employee is worth $1000/yr for their seat, if I should kick someone else off and give it to the new employee, etc...
However, by moving away from per-seat pricing, customers who have switched to the new pricing have now added many more users who can benefit from having access to the Flipper Cloud UI but were not worth paying for individual seats before.
So based on customer behavior and reception to the new plans, it has made things much more flexible for them in practice.
What would suck more than per seat is dividing cost+profit over all customers equally and ending up needing to charge a huge amount for anyone to access with unlimited users. Also bad is going under by not having a sustainable business.
To summarize:
(1) For most user facing products, the value is user access, so that's what you pay for. (2) Costs scale by seat due to increased complexity and support.
I wish them well (and I wish they do not change their focus.)
One solution to the “not all users are equal” problem is to create different types of users and price accordingly. That’s what we’re doing, and it’s working out well so far. It depends on the product and use case, of course.
We'd much rather that 90% of the cases, customers can just invite anyone on their team without fearing ballooning costs. Then they can think about permissions purely from a permissions/access perspective and not have to factor cost into that decision.
We started down that path with free billing seats. But in the end, per seat just never felt right.
As a business owner (I have some other companies) my favorite software to pay for was everything that didn't charge per seat. I'd like my own software to be the same and thus the change.
