Hi, I’m Khanh, and I lead product for monetization and platform here at Coda. Today we announced Coda 4.0—the true all-in-one platform for businesses, now with AI. Alongside this, we’re announcing a few pricing changes.
Here’s a summary of what’s changing
- Coda AI is free for Doc Makers. Unlike many other products who choose to up-charge for AI, we’ve decided to include it in Doc Maker pricing.
- Personal use is free. We’re removing doc size limits on the Free plan for personal docs that aren’t shared with others, so you can start your Coda journey with unlimited rows and objects—for free.
- Only Doc Makers can add and manage pages. As Coda pages have evolved over time to become just as powerful and flexible as docs, you’ll now need to be a Doc Maker to add and manage pages.
What’s not changing
- You only pay for Doc Makers, Editors are free. Editors can collaborate and edit content in existing docs and pages for free, including adding tables and views, writing formulas, and configuring Packs and automations.
- No changes to the price per Doc Maker. Pro and Team plans are still $10 and $30 per Doc Maker per month (paid annually). As always, contact us if you’d like to explore pricing for Enterprise.
A few details
Coda AI is free for Doc Makers.
As we built Coda AI, started using it ourselves, then watched our beta users make magic with it, we’ve seen amazing impact as teams used the work assistant to perform millions of tasks. Even more, we saw AI’s potential to truly empower everyone, and anyone, as a maker to help you feel informed and plugged in, get your creative juices flowing, turn a spark into safe-space brainstorms, then proposals and tasks, then actually help get those tasks done!
This led to a natural question: How can we continue to empower all makers as we transition from beta to GA?
Many other products have chosen to add a premium add-on for their AI offerings. Customers tell us this is expensive and complicated. Not only do they have to juggle AI surcharges across dozens of products, they have to decide user-by-user who needs access to “Microsoft Word with AI” versus “Microsoft Word without AI.”
Having two versions of each product is not only hard on customers, it’s difficult for us as well. In Coda, we found we wanted to infuse AI into every element of the product, so the add-on approach didn’t make sense to us.
Moreover, Coda’s pricing model gave us a different option. With Maker Billing, teams only pay for Doc Makers, and those Doc Makers are often the ones who use Coda AI most extensively. So, we’ve decided to supercharge the Doc Maker role, and include AI at no additional cost for all paid Doc Makers.
A few things to note:
- Coda AI is now out of beta and generally available for all workspaces.
- Because our costs scale with AI usage, we knew we would need some threshold to manage extreme usage. But to minimize the number of customers this impacts, we’ve based our usage model on a credit system that scales with the number of Doc Makers in your workspace and resets every month. AI credits are pooled and shared by all Doc Makers in the workspace. Learn more.
- Editors (and all Free plan users) can also try all of Coda AI’s features for free with limited trial credits. Once their trial credits run out, Editors can still use previously generated AI content, but will need to become a Doc Maker to generate new AI content.
Personal use is free.
While we regularly hear customers rave that Maker Billing is great value for teams, it isn’t as much of an advantage for individual users without a team.
We considered introducing a distinct Personal plan, but ultimately decided to go all-in on a simpler approach—removing doc size limits on the Free plan for all personal docs. We’re excited about how this will allow more makers to use Coda for free in their personal lives and allow people to fully build out their docs to evaluate whether Coda could fit their team’s needs.
A few things to note:
- Existing personal docs that were locked due to doc size limits will now automatically unlock.
- You can still share docs for free. Shared docs will have the same limits that they do today, and even once shared docs exceed limits, you will have 14 days to trial the doc with your team before needing to upgrade.
- Copying templates will no longer trigger upgrade prompts.
Only Doc Makers can add and manage pages.
When we launched Maker Billing in 2019, we started with a straightforward premise: “Charge for makers, not collaborators.” We felt that for teams to adopt Coda, they shouldn’t have friction in the sharing process. We needed a simple line to draw the maker-collaborator boundary, and after a lot of discussion, we decided to define Doc Makers primarily by their ability to create and manage docs, as that was the primary noun of Coda.
In those early versions of Coda, pages were a minor feature—they felt like flat tabs in a spreadsheet. Since then, pages have evolved to become just as powerful and flexible as docs, first with subpages and infinite nesting, more recently with new layouts, full-page embeds that bring in thousands of other apps, and now sync pages and two-way sync.
And with that, the lines between docs and pages have blurred. Docs have evolved to become enduring hubs for teams (sometimes with hundreds of pages), and it’s now just as natural for makers to start a new page as it is to start a fresh doc. It became confusing. Why draw the line at docs?
So we set out to realign our Doc Maker definition to the original intent of Maker Billing: “Charge for makers, not collaborators.” We considered a range of options, all the way to “you must be a Doc Maker to edit schema.” In the end, it was important for us to preserve the collaborative feel of the product, so we landed on a smaller change: moving the line from docs to pages, so you must be a Doc Maker to add and manage pages.
For the vast majority of teams, this results in a small impact (<5% of current Editors needing Doc Maker access). And we’ve been excited by early feedback from customers and community members that this change helps our billing model evolve with the product in the right way.
A few things to note:
- Workspace members will need Doc Maker access to create and manage docs, pages, and folders in the workspace. This includes actions like adding, deleting, hiding, or renaming pages, and configuring doc and page locking. See a full comparison of Doc Maker vs. Editor roles here.
- Changes are effective today for new customers, and effective November 6th for existing customers.
- All workspace admins with existing subscriptions will receive an email today with more details, including how to prepare for this update for your workspace.
Alright, that’s the long and short of it! Have questions for us? Please leave us a note here, or reach out to our team at support@coda.io.
