| Huge fan and proponent of Optimizely and the platform they offer, we made them an integral part of our agency for our performance based CRO clients as a tool we could bring to the table to help execute our ideas for the past 3 years. That is, until they changed their model and began to push agencies off the platform by insisting that the client and not the agency must have the account relationship with Optimizely, and the agency can then "work" on the account but no longer under one account spread across multiple clients. I have no objections to pricing changes and strategy pivots, more power to them and I understand to develop more and more features, pricing must be raised to match usage. We would happily pay more per month, however we don't see the business sense in handing over our client relationships directly to Optimizely so that our clients could then choose to drop us as an agency at anytime, but keep the Optimizely account. An account that would be full of our work product, testing ideas and custom code developed to implement tests that a client could now easily take to another agency and continue benefiting from the work. (Yes, we have contracts with our clients, but we are not naive enough to think that clients won't look for a way to do away with our fees if they can take our services and work product with them.) Our ability to utilize the tools provided by Optimizely and build winning tests has helped us grow our business, but this change in agency support has caused us to need to look for alternate solutions. It would be great if some of this latest raise could be used to re-invest in agencies again, providing a client manager style interface where multiple accounts/sub-accounts can reside under one login. Even if each client needs to have a different pricing structure based on their usage patterns, can't share visits across clients, but could be arranged and managed by the agency as one point of contact and billing. I'd love to kick back up our usage of the platform, as the new features I see them rolling out are enticing and I am sure this raise will only accelerate that, but we can't commit to a vendor that seems to actively enable and almost encourage our clients to circumvent our own service model. |