Launched: Coda 2.0, a simpler, cleaner, and faster doc for teams

John_Beaudoin_Jack · 2019-10-25T20:44:44.885Z

@mallika Yes, but it’s really not sufficient, is it? I’m not going to subscribe until Coda responds to what sounds like Near-universal concerns around the absence of Cross Docs functionality at the Pro level and the significant limits on automations. I think that Coda should grandfather in beta users at full functionality for at least 6 months and provide credit.

Paul_Danyliuk · 2019-10-25T20:58:28.677Z

Thank you for the callout @jeo, that was unexpected

Chris_Thornett1 · 2019-10-25T22:45:59.096Z

I have to agree with this. There’s a huge difference between being able to edit and simply interacting. If someone starts using Coda as an app for a small business (as the company brand messaging suggests) doesn’t that mean that any customer who wants to click a button has to be a subscriber? Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of being able to create apps?

You could probably draw the line at anything beyond buttons and pulldowns and form fills, as actual manual field adjustments/entries and alterations to the document format would suggest something more than just a customer interaction.

Juan_Luis_Chulilla · 2019-10-26T00:11:24.363Z

I conos not agrede more. For now I cannot use Coda anything but a passive dashboard for my customers

anon86103599 · 2019-10-26T00:20:02.935Z

Not sure I have much new to add to the discussion, as most have said it already, but best to add another voice as well, just in case it’s going to make a difference.

I love Coda. It’s amazing. I have been using it for quite a while, but for personal projects only. That is, I wasn’t willing to commit my work to it, nor to recommend it to others or my clients, the reasons being -

The dependency on Google (I despise google and all that it does, and doesn’t, stand for) - I understand why companies choose the google path (because it’s an easy way to leverage a lot of functionality), but not everyone wants to be tied to google and have their life invasively “strip searched” all the time (personal rant)
There wasn’t a pricing model - investing time and effort in a product that was eventually going to cost but where that cost was unknown, was too great a risk - as the feedback from others is clearly demonstrating

To use an analogy, this is quite like a roleplaying group, where the gamemaster ends up doing most of the work and paying for all the books - and the players get to come along and enjoy all that. The difference here is that Coda now wants the players to pay them, a lot, to look at and use the books the GM has already paid for! And that is going too far.

The impression I get is they didn’t test this with the market at all! It’s plain crazy.

Hopefully they will take a long, long, long, hard look at the feedback, withdraw the pricing model, and go back to the drawing board.

Important note -

I don’t believe there should be free options that allow people to use 98% of a tool forever and for nothing - that’s just not sustainable and not fair to those who actually do pay, and definitely not fair to everyone working on the product.

I personally believe free tiers should cover minimal use and basically be there as a way for people to try before they buy - but, if you like a product and it is useful to you, then you should support it (when I read complaints saying there’s not enough free functionality in an app, I always wonder - how would you react if you’re employer said you should be doing 90% of your work for nothing???).

I fully expect and am happy to pay for the tools I use - I’m a developer myself and I like to be paid for my hard work too. I’m not looking for a freebie here.

But, pricing has to be appropriate to the market.

My thoughts on pricing are -

Similar to what @Paul_Danyliuk suggested, charge more to makers, but, here’s my take, have tiered pricing -

an “amateur” level at a fairly low cost per month, maybe $5-10. They get to build any doc they like but it can only be shared with say 1-3 different teams. This is for the small business with a cluey staff member that can put together a doc or two for the business.
a “pro” level that is quite costly, probably $20-30 per month, maybe even more, but give them a way to sell docs or something, so they can be reimbursed. As a maker, if I had a way to get reimbursed, I would probably be happy to pay a few hundred dollars a year for the privilege.

Then, make the cost of using docs much cheaper. And once you are a paying ‘user’, you can access any docs in any team. There could be a few tiers here as well - if you only need docs with basic functionality, then say $2-3 per month. It increases the more advanced the functionality you need to be able to use in your docs. Up to an absolute maximum of, I think, $10 per month for access to all functionality, packs and automations.

Additionally as @jeo said, find a way to reimburse those who currently spend considerable time for free helping the community (which ultimately helps Coda enormously) - eg. providing x number of solutions per month earns $x or x% off your subscription.

As it stands now, I’m out and likely won’t be investing any or much more time in Coda. But I will keep an eye on it and hope they come to their senses and rectify this.

Justin_K · 2019-10-26T00:25:50.433Z

As a solo user, I could have justified maybe $4 a month, but the pricing is just too high for me.

Josh_Unwin1 · 2019-10-26T03:36:38.543Z

I’m finding the pricing plans both:
A: Pretty overpriced
B: Too confusing

Right now I primarily use Coda for personal use, I also setup a doc for my previous (small) company which became popular among staff. So I’m thinking about it from a few points of view, primarily individual and non-business team use.

To keep this easy to digest, I’m just summing my feedback up in bullet points:

Too many factors being changed from tier to tier
There’s a lot of jargon words, even for a long time Coda user (Doc maker, editor, workspace member)
This is the big one for me: the line between an individual and team is really unclear. For example you can have a team consisting of ‘pro’ users, or a team consisting of ‘team’ users? Who is paying for what here? If I have a a pro account, and a friend has a pro account, how does that work? Do I then have to pay an extra $10 if I invite them to my workspace even if we’re both paying? Can a ‘team’ have a mix of pro and team tier users?
Github and cross-doc packs being limited to team users only seems arbitrary to me? If I want those just for myself, I need to pay $30 a month for a ‘team’ user even though I’m on my own?

How I’d suggest it to be
If it were me, I’d be inclined to ditch the free tier altogether in favour of a generous free trial period. Then make the standard tier cheaper (around $4 a month) and tailored to individuals. As an individual, they are not restricted in terms of packs that aren’t purely business related (jira and intercom come to mind) and shouldn’t run into limits in terms of doc sizes/automations within reason.

They can also still create a workspace and invite people to join their doc/workspace, but that invited user will also have to pay for an individual account themselves after their free trial (in addition, you could potentially keep the read-only access and stuff available for non-paying users). This way, individuals can create their own teams where necessary, but they are made up of individuals paying for their own accounts.

Then the teams tier should be focused for businesses where one person (ie, the business owner/delegated staff member) is responsible for paying for their users. I get what you’re trying to do by bundling editors with a doc-maker but I think it’s just more confusing. I think the team owner should be able to add the exact number of doc-makers and editors they need and each user type has a price tier ($2 for a editor, $6 for a maker or whatever).

This feels much clearer for both businesses and individuals wanting to build a team together to me. It’s closer to how services like Google Drive works: fewer factors to consider between tiers, a clear individuals tier and business tier.

On a side note, appreciate the $30 discount for being an early adopter but it feels more of a ploy to get us to upgrade quickly seeing as it expires Dec 1st and, based on the current pricing it doesn’t go very far!

John_Beaudoin_Jack · 2019-10-26T10:56:50.930Z

I wonder if the people on @jeo’s list would lead an effort – using a shared Coda doc, of course - to help build a consensus alternative pricing recommendation? Frequent contributors like @Paul_Danyliuk and @tomavatars have a lot of credibility with the rest of us and with our friendly Codans here in the community. The rest of us could “sign on” to the doc to show our endorsement of it.

Some obvious consensus points have already developed (I think):

Coda provides great value and as such needs and deserves a successful monetization strategy to reward founders and investors, compensate employees and ensure sustainability
Relax the row and object limits on the free plan
Lengthen the transition/grandfather period
Equalize availability of automation, Packs and cross-doc functionality for Pro and Team subscribers
Rethink charging for individual “users” (button-clickers and form fillers)

I don’t know how others might feel about it, but I’m wondering if Coda could essentially make the Pro Level (unlimited docs, unlimited rows, unlimited objects) free for all but use a “cafeteria” pricing plan to charge for individual Power-Ups: automation, Cross Doc functionality, individual Packs, and blocks of “users.” Trello Gold is kind of a model for this approach. In my own case (I’m a freelancer and consultant) I could see spending between $10 and $20 a month on these power-ups, which would appear to meet Coda’s desired price point while not paying for features I could never or would never use.

-JB

Pch · 2019-10-26T11:20:19.555Z

John_Beaudoin_Jack:

I don’t know how others might feel about it, but I’m wondering if Coda could essentially make the Pro Level (unlimited docs, unlimited rows, unlimited objects) free for all but use a “cafeteria” pricing plan to charge for individual Power-Ups: automation, Cross Doc functionality, individual Packs, and blocks of “users.” Trello Gold is kind of a model for this approach. In my own case (I’m a freelancer and consultant) I could see spending between $10 and $20 a month on these power-ups, which would appear to meet Coda’s desired price point while not paying for features I could never or would never use.

I’ve send an email earlier to the support as suggested here to kind of “summarize” my thoughts (even though it was a long email) about the imbalance between the tiers and suggested something like that too as an alternative to the current pricing model .
I also think it would engage more free users to go further and upgrade their workspace.
But I don’t know it could be doable …

Sidney_Junior · 2019-10-26T11:31:03.102Z

Same situation here.
Actually I’m glad that I didnt spend much time building docs.

Jean_Pierre_Traets · 2019-10-26T12:42:41.981Z

anon86103599:

a “pro” level that is quite costly, probably $20-30 per month, maybe even more, but give them a way to sell docs or something, so they can be reimbursed. As a maker, if I had a way to get reimbursed, I would probably be happy to pay a few hundred dollars a year for the privilege.

Hi @anon86103599,

I like the idea above, no problem to pay a bigger amount when you get the opportunity to monetise from the work developed. Obviously this model should be investigated on, but some kind of a marketplace seems an option to me as they seem to be proven profitable.

Jay_Lefebvre · 2019-10-26T12:47:51.912Z

Another thing I don’t get is the sharing structure. If i’m a pro user and I share a doc with another pro user, do we both pay for each other?

Paul_Danyliuk · 2019-10-26T13:08:37.450Z

I assume, you pay per user per workspace, i.e. when you share a doc that’s in your Team- or Pro-tier workspace with another user and make them an editor / guest editor, that counts towards your workspace’s pricing. That’s regardless if they have any paid workspaces of their own.

John_Beaudoin_Jack · 2019-10-26T13:16:22.683Z

Good thought, although I worry about the terminology. Right now, Coda is using “Pro” to denote the non-team paid tier. So I am likely to subscribe at the Pro level, but I’m not a developer (I use Coda for that reason – to create useful, rudimentary apps without coding skills) and can’t monetize my work in the way that perhaps you and @anon86103599 would be able to.

Additionally, it would be great if Coda opened up its “power-ups” (Automation and Packs features) to enable developers in the community to create and sell those to us non-developers.

Tomas_Jansson · 2019-10-26T21:06:39.922Z

Is the pricing calculator wrong here: https://coda.io/pricing ?

The text says you get 5 editors for each doc maker, but it seems like 6 in the calculator… is that because you count the doc makers as one of the 6?

Dalmo_Mendonca · 2019-10-26T21:46:55.896Z

Paul_Danyliuk:

I assume, you pay per user per workspace , i.e. when you share a doc that’s in your Team- or Pro-tier workspace with another user and make them an editor / guest editor, that counts towards your workspace’s pricing. That’s regardless if they have any paid workspaces of their own.

That effectively limits community-built docs or wikis to free docs.

Juan_Luis_Chulilla · 2019-10-26T22:07:22.805Z

Indeed it’s not possible to share a doc for asking questions to the community anymore. Fee risk is too high

mallika · 2019-10-26T22:14:15.259Z

@Dalmo_Mendonca @Juan_Luis_Chulilla - you will always have a free workspace with as many collaborators as you need. It is easy to move a doc in there and then move it out within 14 days - so even large docs can be worked on.

But I am thinking through other option to both allowing community members to try new upcoming features and also easily and freely help each other.

You’ve seen us build and iterate so provide feedback and work with us. I’ll be reaching out to folks to discuss this more so feel free to message me here if you want to collaborate on this.

Ian_Nicholson · 2019-10-26T22:31:37.049Z

JeremyOlson:

Yeah, good thought. Would love ideas here for what people think could be fair. One idea we’ve considered is having some kind of “contributor” or “user” role where folks can only take certain actions, and those folks could be priced differently. But not super straightforward how to do that. Definitely something we are going to be thinking about more.

My use case currently is for tracking Cub Scouts dues and fundraising (85 of them currently). We run our group on donations and fundraising, so any expense is hard to justify. Since Coda works so well for this I’ve signed up for the Pro plan on my personal dime (donating $144/yr to pay for Coda will sting my wallet but it’s definitely light-years beyond Google Sheets). Today we were already at 194% of our quotas before I subscribed…

One thing I’ve noticed is that the Doc Protection permissions and locking is on the Team plan, and to get that functionality I’ll have to spend $432 per month just to keep members of our leadership from accidentally deleting an important table or wiping-out rows!!! We definitely need an affordable way to keep the structure solid and give simple editing abilities to less-confident users; I have been describing Coda as “amazing but extremely fragile” to our leadership, and I’ve held off completely on giving edit abilities to anyone else…

I see that you are planning to offer something for non-profits. As I said before $144 is high for our group but I’m planning to pay it for now; something around half of that would be more justifiable for us (I might even convince our leadership to pay instead of eating the cost myself!) Also, qualifying as a non-profit on some other services looked like it would take jumping through hoops to achieve, so I hope Coda can keep that to a minimum (we are but a small branch of the national Scouting organization, so providing documentation will be extremely difficult).

Ian_Nicholson · 2019-10-26T22:33:30.650Z

Tomas_Jansson:

Is the pricing calculator wrong here: Pricing, pricing plans - Coda ?

The text says you get 5 editors for each doc maker, but it seems like 6 in the calculator… is that because you count the doc makers as one of the 6?

That seems likely. It isn’t totally clear whether Doc Makers are included in Editors but it appears they are. Maybe some clarification on that page is in order?