[chrisblackwell]

I will be using this, and dropping a lot of my paid AirTable bases...and let me please explain why.

Airtable makes it VERY hard to collaborate with people outside my organization. We are a team of 7 people. No longer a scrappy 1-person startup, but not an enterprise client by any-means.

If I want to add a single person to an Airtable base, that's $24 a month please. I have one client with 12 people that want to collaborate on the base by posting comments. I can't justify $288 a month just to keep the comments for all time.I contacted Airtable about this and was told the "Enterprise Plan" would be a perfect fit. Minimum $15k a year commitment.

Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?

[ig1]

There’s a few factors at play;

1) There’s customers who will pay 15k for the exact same users/features as you’re willing to pay <3k for. If they offered a cheap package then those customers wouldn’t pay for the expensive package.

2) Sub enterprise customers are a pain, they’re often as expensive as enterprise customers (acquisition, support, etc) but with significantly less revenue and higher churn. When a company decides where to focus it’s going to go where the money is.

[social_quotient]

I’m small’ish agency and we have clients with lots of stakeholders often that just need to be added to artifact systems like this for formal reasons but they aren't active enough to justify the costs.

I totally get that they need to make money to keep making a good product and stay alive. It’s a difficult problem.

One idea - If small clients are a pain (because of support) then support should be a specific thing that can dialed in a bit. AWS is fantastic here. Noisy people are gonna pay for it... but if I’m small, yet not noisy, then I don’t get hurt and can continue to drink the koolaid.

[alisonkisk]

The simple answer is to charge for support like every enterprise company does

[donmcronald]

> Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?

Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks.

And they have the same tone deaf solution; upgrade to Ultimate.

Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with.

[Swizec]

> Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with.

Disagree. The issue is that they don’t want cheap users. It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation, and usually cheap users are the most demanding to support in relation to their revenue. A user that pays $50/year and has 5 questions to support us very different than 5 questions from a user posting $5000/year

[donmcronald]

I see the support excuse all the time, but I don't understand why it needs to be that way and I don't really believe it to be honest. Sell me a small business version that includes per-incident support. If someone has a problem and balks at the idea of paying fair value for the support they need, then I agree they're not worth having as a customer.

If the goal is to ignore or be actively hostile towards the bottom 80%, I guess a lot of SaaS companies are succeeding. To me though, they're building poorer quality products that aren't going to capture enough up and coming businesses and the long term impact is going to be a bunch of bloated garbage with a ton of half baked features where everyone is competing for the "enterprise" dollars.

> It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation

To me, that's what it's really about. It's pump and dump quality SaaS that's built for an IPO, not for the users.

[Swizec]

> If the goal is to ignore or be actively hostile towards the bottom 80%, I guess a lot of SaaS companies are succeeding.

Yes, that is the goal. When an org decides to target primarily enterprise, the whole business model changes. You go from self serve to sales, from support chat to SLAs, etc.

You literally become unable to support small customers cost effectively and they are not worth your time.

Happens a lot in the B2B SaaS space when companies realize how much easier it is to have 10 users for $10,000 than 1000 users for $10. Some companies decide to keep focusing on small businesses and indies, which is great.

Ultimately there’s room for both business models in the world. But as a business, you have to make sure you work with businesses where you are [still] the target market.

[renewiltord]

Significantly damages your brand to do this and you'll defacto turn into a consulting company. Plus places incentives on your org to force things to be incidents since that's what pays. You'll get stuck in a local minimum of being a small-time consulting company.

Or maybe you won't. But that's the reason I wouldn't want to do it.

Besides, there's no way you can only access the no-support users. Google, for instance, offers one of these for their email product and are able to make the product free. In their case, they got brand awareness quite fast. But even though Google has Google One in the US if you want paid response, this forum frequently decries the lack of support.

The problem is the users who occupy the no-support space cannot be selected as consumers. When you try to do that, you will get an army of users who want to not pay but who do want support. They think they want no-support but they don't, and they will retroactively rebrand their reasons to be more than money.

That isn't bitterness or anything (I've always dealt with B2B software) but it's the reality of the thing as I can see.

[donmcronald]

I deal with a lot of small businesses and to me it feels like that entire sector of the industry is being abandoned. Most small businesses owners are practical and will pay for things when they need them, but they're fairly price sensitive and they expect good value for their money.

Take MS365 as an example. Most small businesses I deal with would be way better off with Exchange than with their current shared hosting email providers, but the value just isn't there for a lot of them. Microsoft thinks they're selling all this awesome stuff like Exchange, OneDrive, Teams, etc. in an ultra valuable bundle, but all small businesses see is Exchange plus a bunch of other bloat they're never going to use but are forced to pay for. They just want Exchange.

Plus, at least for the ones I've dealt with, the partner exclusively interacts with the customer, so bad support gets labelled as having a bad partner, not as Microsoft being bad. That also means Microsoft isn't incurring any cost to be the first point of contact either. In fact, the only time I've ever dealt with MS support for something Exchange related, they sucked. I ended up solving my own problem and closing the support issue by telling them what was wrong. Reputationally, we're the one that recommends it, we're the first point of contact for support, and we're the ones that take the reputation hit if something isn't working. At least that's my experience.

I see lots of small businesses that have 50 mailboxes for $60 / year at a shared hosting provider. That's $.10 per month per user. Guess how they react when you tell them moving to MS365 will be $5 per month per user? Now I'm not saying MS365 isn't worth more, but it's a HARD sell to tell a small business they should pay 50x for something that's currently working fine as far as they're concerned. Then you add in things like backup solutions changing per user per month and all of a sudden you're telling a small business they should pay 75x for the same feature matrix their shared hosting provider is selling them. They don't care about all the stupid value adds. In fact that stuff is negative value because it's unneeded complexity which results in frustration and increased support costs.

[ab_testing]

I think you answered your question right there. Microsoft does not want the business of a company where 50 mailboxes cost $60 for the whole year. They are happy to leave that market to other lower cost providers

[kanwisher]

even google charges $6+ a month for email. If they can't pay that tiny bit of money maybe they don't need a full featured product and its not a good market segment

[alisonkisk]

Meanwhile MS and Google have thousands of satisfied customers with millions of users paying the $10/mo/user.

[ta988]

Google is making money with users' emails contents and ads displayed in their interface, so that's not like they are doing that for free. In the case of airtable, I'm not sure non paying users are bringing them anything that can be monetized (I may just not be aware of vicious monetization ways though)

[cmeacham98]

Sell me a no or very limited support plan then (or charge extra for the support when it's needed). At least personally, if your docs are halfway decent and I don't run into any major bugs I will almost never make a support request.

[jwitchel]

That's not quite right. It's not the support. It's the churn metrics. A guy who uses your system episodically can give the appearance of a high churn rate. This is very bad and if you're raising money can imply that your system isn't sticky which lowers your valuations. If you're in the fundraising game that's actually worse than a few extra dollars of revenue.

[social_quotient]

Goodhart's law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

[ta988]

We need another law here... When everybody maintains bad measures despite knowing they don't work. Impact factors in science are another example of that. You can say it is broken and proove it, your jury for grants or positions will still ask you to put the numbers next to your papers, and if you don't they'll do it themselves...

[Aeolun]

The problem is getting those 5000/month accounts if nobody wants to use your product before they get there.

[Swizec]

You’d be surprised. Those users come from sales more than self serve. Very different business model.

[alisonkisk]

Who is going to buy your high touch sales offer if they see no one uses your product?

Is this a thing where all the YC companies buy each other's stuff to prop up the revenue numbers until IPO?

[Swizec]

Have you tried buying from salesforce? Very high touch, very expensive, very unfit for small businesses, hugely successful and widely used.

Different audiences, different approaches.

Many successful businesses are such that none of us have ever heard of, but are making millions, sometimes billions. We haven’t heard of them because we’re not the target market and talking to us is a waste of resources.

[ShakataGaNai]

Ah $240/year, I wish it were that cheap. If you want the security goodies is $1200/year/user. You have to make the impossible choice of getting everyone involved with the tool, or getting all the features. Because you can't afford the features AND the users.

[hanniabu]

> Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks.

Google Form linked in your readme, done deal.

[viraptor]

> Why is this happening in the SasS world?

Because it works for them. I mean, they likely have customers for that $15k plan. And if they do, why would it be worth their time discussing <$24 plans that require extra dev time with you? (I don't mean it as a complaint - just awareness that for-profit companies will do for-profit things)

[jerieljan]

> Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?

The in-between for some software out there is "Guest access". Services like Notion, Miro and Mural have this figured out, but it is very disappointing that most do not.

[spoonjim]

80% of the software revenue in the world comes from a few thousand companies. The big software vendors don’t give a shit about chasing that last 20%.

[azernik]

Price discrimination is a hard problem! There's a conflict between soaking your customers for as much as they're willing to pay, and making your product accessible to customers that won't pay that much. Finding a feature set that the first set of customers absolutely needs and will pay extra for, but the second set can live without, is hard.

[donmcronald]

The problem is that pricing is expected to be the opposite of what it really should be. Companies with 10k users expect a discount, but the reality is they should be paying a lot more because building a product to serve 10k users is much harder than building a product to serve 10 users.

On the flipside, why should I, as a small user, share in the cost of things like scalability, HA, SLAs, etc.? I don't need those things.

Based on what I've seen in larger businesses, those things can be paper features. It doesn't matter if the small business edition has the same scalability and HA as the enterprise edition. Large businesses will still pay for the enterprise edition because they need to be able to show they paid for HA, etc. to cover their own asses if anything every goes wrong.

Charge for scalability and reliability, not features IMO.

[sofixa]

Hard disagree. Scalability and reliability, and SSO[0] are basic features any piece of software should have. Even a one-person startup shouldn't have to accept a tool being down for a month or all of their data lost due to a fire in a datacenter. Charging extra for any of these is a very shitty business model.

0 - sso.tax

[donmcronald]

How much scalability does one person need? And no HA doesn’t mean “down for a month”. It means I have no issue with enduring a few hours of downtime here and there. And HA and backups aren’t even related, so...

[sofixa]

One person could still require significant capacity - imagine an API with flight info, and your one person SaaS that does some magic with it by getting the data real time for all flights around the world.

> And no HA doesn’t mean “down for a month”. It means I have no issue with enduring a few hours of downtime here and there

No HA means downtime is expected and frequent ( baring crazy luck, but let's not base business on hope). If your invoicing, or project management, or note taking or whatever SaaS is down and you need it now to do something for a client of yours, how many hours of downtime can you accept?

> And HA and backups aren’t even related, so...

You said scalability and reliability, good backups are a part of reliability. If a SaaS cheaps on backups and HA for small time clients like one-person companies or small startups, and then a fire burns it all ( but not entreprise customers, because their backups are replicated to another DC), is it OK because they were small?

[alisonkisk]

Is it 1000x times harder to server 10K users?

[higeorge13]

In some cases yes. I worked for a b2b company, which was not designed as multi-tenant and all their customers were under the same db and the same service. Now imagine response time for small business vs enterprises (yes they had a few of those paying premium, lol), sometimes the later was infinite.

[tyingq]

It does seem odd for those "low code" tools to not have a way to deal with "external users". For example, it would be logical to create a tool for accepting job candidates. The internal facing piece would be limited to some reasonable number of users, but the outward facing piece would have to allow anyone to submit a record.

I do know that knack.com has a pricing model based on number of records instead of number of users. Might be an option for you, depending on how many records you have.

[PebblesRox]

Airtable does allow you to create a publishable form view so that anyone can submit a new record.

You can also add read-only users to a base without having to pay for them. But giving them any kind of edit access (even just the ability to add comments to records) requires a full-fledged user account.

[Joeri]

An enterprise IWMS system I worked on solved this by charging only for enabled accounts. An admin could enable or disable accounts, and every month a report would show how many unique accounts were enabled that month and determined the billing. That shouldn’t be that hard to implement for airtable or any other SaaS, so it is puzzling why that option isn’t offered.

[eb0la]

I remember Qlikview (reporting/data discovery software) had a per minute license for this.

There are a lot of inactive users in reporting apps. A lot of people just log in once a month to see a single report and this was a useful way to get more users onboard.

It looked scary at first because you didn't knew beforehand how many minutes you should buy.

Mising standard and by minute license worked great, though

[markfer]

That's ridiculous. Collaborating with clients should almost always be free.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of collaboration are you doing with clients? I'm the CEO of a platform specifically for businesses and their clients, and we loosely compete with Airtable.

[ComodoHacker]

Are your tables large enough Office 365 can't handle it for a reasonable price?

[auxym]

Do you mean excel, or has Microsoft come out with an airtable clone?

Excel is a really poor substitute for airtable.

[zokier]

MS has also PowerApps and Power BI. I have never touched them, and I hope I never need to. But they seem to play remotely in the same area.

[jasdine817]

SharePoint Lists is designed to compete with Airtables.

[ComodoHacker]

I mean Excel, and specifically for GP's use case.

[loceng]

"Why is this happening in the SasS world???"

It's the VC-finance industrial complex expecting a drive towards an IPO to exit while offloading the risk and unsustainable fees to the general public via misaligned stock brokers buying/selling to get fees vs. only benefitting long-term if their picks earn profit.