Good lord… making new email accounts and arbitrarily adding fake doc makers to my workspace just to access more credits!?
Pricing strategies like this make me wonder if your monetization and product teams have a proper understanding of who a paying Doc Maker is.
AI is extremely helpful in the right contexts, most of which involve a bit of scale. In this framework the average AI system I’m building in Coda is gonna burn these credits out in less than a week (3000), and still for limited business value.
Strong appreciation for @Emi_Jimenez clear point that not being able to buy new credits basically removes the AI feature. This is largely because using AI will be too risky as a doc maker.
Part of the issue is that many of the use cases for AI within an operating coda doc system involve the system generally becoming dependent on it. Once credits run out, an AI enabled system isn’t going to “gracefully degrade”, its just going to stop working. This is less of an issue for non systemic uses, which have low business value at best, such as one off “improve this copy on the canvas”, but quite honestly… Who would move towards coda for this? Most of us are paying for GPT 4 and 3+ other AI enabled app subscriptions already - this is extremely marginal value. At present the ai enabled “generate this X type of table with Y columns” is lower quality / reliability of output than just pulling directly from the template library. The only place where Coda AI is elevating Coda competitively from a savvy doc maker’s perspective is as an extension of coda’s formula language and as an integrated capability within tables. Coda with AI is the only collaborative low code platform that enables scalable structured AI within a relational database framework. Incidentally, Coda needs users to believe in this value, as it is one of the few areas where the user’s payoff feels appropriate to user’s time, money and energy invested in the product.
Unfortunately, using this differentiated value (the only market differentiating value of Coda AI in my opinion) creates inherent user and system dependencies, and also depends entirely on reliable scalability. No amount of “actively managing monthly AI usage from an analytics dashboard” is going to remotely address this or enable “moderate AI usage” with any meaningful or differentiating value for a doc maker.
And this is why we pay for Coda in the first place. Free users can toy around with a slightly more advanced Google docs. Actively paying “Doc Makers” are actually collaborative solution designers building systems to solve problems for their businesses and teams. Once we make something, others depend on it. If we’re going to use a feature at all, we’re going to use it in the context of building a system to take responsibility for addressing a business issue. Why else would someone spend 30+ dollars a month, invest time to learn a bespoke formula language, and invest time to model their problem domain in relational database tables - all within a low code cloud based “doc that functions like your own custom app”?
I certainly appreciate the need for a pricing change in light of AI usage costs, and as a long time paying Coda user, I am excited to support that. I also appreciate the desire to incentivize growing doc maker numbers within workspaces, which seems the only logical motivation for this monetization strategy. Shoehorning product feature usage to do so shows a deep disconnect with what and who a doc maker is. For many of us, we’re trying to find more ways to bring value to our collaborators, and most often when those collaborators get turned on to Coda at a level where they want to become a paying doc maker, its because they realize its relevance to their broader work in completely unrelated projects and organizations - and as such they are going to do so in their own separate workspaces where credit counts won’t pool for them.
Each time Coda introduces a pricing framework that feels deeply out of step with the core user base, I find myself having to ask if I can keep trusting the platform to grow in ways that will enhance the future of my work, or if it would be better to continue looking elsewhere.