Indeed, Maker billing is a key ingredient for a lot of us.
My teams’ opinion regarding pricing is that we’d welcome a price hike (or extra tiers) should new core Doc (non-AI related) features be added (extended access/permission control among others for instance). However, any per-user type of pricing would be an immediate deal breaker.
Since the community (and thus Coda’s users) seems divided on AI, maybe looking to AI as an Add-on/independent upgrade rather than integrated into the pricing could help as well. Let’s say if you force me to pay more because you’ve integrated AI everywhere but me and my team are not using it, I’m wasting my hard earn money. Much further down the road, when your AI solutions are close to perfect for all users and the great majority of user are actually purchasing the add-on, then it’d make sense to factor it in the base prices.
Personally, I’m paying for out-of-Coda AIs because it adds a lot of value to my work and productivity. But the state of AI inside Coda is useless to me and frustrating to the point that I actually feel I’m losing my time and thus money, each single time I’ve tried to use it. And the way it’s been integrated (each editable cells in a table) is very painful for the user right now in terms of UX. To reconcile both world (those that may find value in that and those who don’t), maybe having some kind of AI toggle at the top of the page (somewhere near the settings icon) could make the AI integration disappear entirely/appear as is now, at will.
Finally, your greatest Christmas gift to the community should be sharing the Roadmap (or at least concrete details about the vision) that’s currently in your head rather than mentioning it exists.