Launched: Coda 2.0, a simpler, cleaner, and faster doc for teams

I’ve been in love with Coda since Day 1. The support has been amazing, the features are great and the possibilities endless (literally). We all knew a pricing model was coming, but I must say this is not ideal.

The first thing I don’t understand is the size limitation on the free plan. I get that this is a model used by Notion and others, but this will be a big turnoff for our clients. We built docs to manage every aspect of their life, and those docs can get big really fast. Most of them are over the limit without any rows. Having to tell them: Look, we built this great system that comes with our training, it’s like a google sheet on steroids, but you’ll have to pay 240$ a year for it. - Is far from ideal

PLUS

it this case, they would have to upgrade to a team account to get features like Gmail, Calendar and cross-doc, which also doesn’t make sense since they are realtors (usually a team of 1-3, not 7+).

Then, I’m not sure to understand the difference between a guest editor and a doc maker. Sure, one can create docs, but that’s it. We have dozens of VA’s working in our docs. This will get pretty expensive for just pushing buttons and checkboxes.

I agree a lot with @Paul_Danyliuk:

I think I posted my ideal pricing model suggestions somewhere in the community long ago. The idea was Robin Hoodish: keep Coda free for individual makers and small teams, and compensate by charging mid- and large businesses more (since they can afford paying an extra). This would be achieved by making only those features paid that are important to enterprise uses: locking, permissions, perhaps cross-doc (because free users still have Zapier to simulate cross-doc, just not as convenient), longer history, premium packs etc. And small teams and individual users can live well without permissions or, say, Slack integration. The number of rows or elements should have never been a limiting factor.

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This really seems like the perfect pricing model right here. I agree. Editors and creators aren’t really different. The only real difference is that it adds additional processes for someone who wants to edit a doc to go through a specific gatekeeper. Especially seeing as how there isn’t a limit on number of docs and no reason to get “approval” to create a new doc, this is just red tape for the sake of red tape.

@JeremyOlson I saw a couple messages in this thread where you mentioned to reach out if there was a use case for cross-doc that was interesting and prohibited by the team plan. It relates to both this pricing model and the cross-doc functionality.

We are a small internal product incubator within a larger agency. We are the only ones who use Coda, but the “investors” at the parent org need to see the data on a monthly basis. They’re not creating, or even interacting with controls, but they need a rollup across the different products. Below that, we have four people who create and edit docs across two different product teams. Creation is very rare, normally one per month, but if one of us comes up with an idea, we should be able to create a doc and start playing around without asking someone else to just click a button so we can go in and populate it.

Honestly, we would probably use Coda to get around this. Having a seperate doc with a button to notify the maker that we want a new doc to play around in. Again, though, just an extra step.

For $30, we would definitely see value if it included the ability for people on each of those product teams to create a doc. For $12/maker and cross-doc (which we need for parent company reporting), we also see the value. But if three of us were to create a doc for our teams in a given month and our pricing were to go up to $90 for that month, that would be outrageous!

Basically, this is alpha pricing that is unpredictable and creates processes for the sake of creating processes.

I definitely agree with you arguments.
In my previous company I would definitely have used the pro plan and made a good use of the free editors per doc maker - but crossdoc or locking is a must for many use case and a bit of a no go for me at 120$/y
Right now, as a freelance, I want to keep using coda for free for some time, but the 50 blocks and 1000 rows limits seems too small for some of my usage…

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@Paul_Danyliuk - Let’s be clear: Zapier is not an alternative to Cross Docs. I say this as someone who already relies on Zapier heavily in my Coda use. Zapier is about automation, and duplicates Coda’s automation functionality. But if you are trying to avoid duplicating data in multiple Coda Docs (for a wide variety of use cases) and are worried about data integrity, Zapier isn’t a Cross-Docs alternative. Second, why pay Zapier when you are already paying Coda? One of the justifications that Codans are offering is that Coda allows you to eliminate other paid apps. Cross-Docs functionality is critical to some of us who are obvious candidates for the Pro level plan but not the Team level offering.

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I am not advocating for using Zapier instead of cross-doc. It was a workaround I implemented for one of my clients when cross-doc wasn’t even in the public beta (actually what I did was even more complicated: it was 2-way sync Coda <-> MySQL, and separately Coda-triggered sync down MySQL -> individual docs).

I’m just saying that I don’t see a problem with making new features paid from the start (like it’s with cross-doc), as opposed to making paid what was already free, and there was no talk of it ever getting paid. Folks who were using Coda for free and didn’t have cross-doc would just continue using whatever they were using before in place of cross-doc. It’s a convenience feature, not an essential. Hence it’s ok that it is paid.

That said, I still very much disagree that it’s only available for Teams plan and not Pro plan.

I’d disagree though that Zapier duplicates Coda’s automation functionality. Coda automations are limited to what’s going on within a doc, plus some pack actions. Zapier is much more flexible and connects many more apps together. I say this as someone who worked for a client whose all dataflows were supported by nothing but 100+ zaps :slight_smile:

In fact, automations and Zapier/Integromat/alike complement each other.

Ok, I found pricing complex too.
I am now at free tier.

  1. Why there are unlimited doc makers and unlimited editors in free, but limited in other tiers?
  2. Github pack says that I should update manually at free tier, but there is still “Sync daily” option. Why?
  3. Locking is nice, but how can I hide some sections from viewers entirely? Many sections contain team-private information, it is not enough to just disable edit for viewers, they should not see information inside.
  4. What will happen to my oversized doc after Dec 1 ?
  5. Why does section count as object, even empty one? Most of my docs have structure “one section - one table”, so tables count twice and doc faster reaches limit. Do you force me to use some inelegant and messy structure (all tables in one section) with no profit for you in terms of my data consumption and calculation cost for my doc?
  6. I created a doc which I help community with. Some hints and answers to questions on this forum. A dozen of people asked me to give them editor permissions and I did. Should I now delete all these community members and lock for them ability to test my answers on their questions because of editors limit?
  7. Why there is still large annoying blinking cursor at the right of tables even in centered mode?
  8. Why there is still no dates localization?
  9. Have you solved main problem with formulas?
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Hi Juan, Guest Editors will be charged as Editors in our pricing plan. The good news is that we support a set of free Editors for every Doc Maker that you pay for. We are hopeful that this will balance out pricing as you grow your team. If those Guest Editors are no longer needed I would recommend removing them. You can also move to to Guest Viewer if you still wanted to give them access to view/comment the docs that are shared with them. Guest Viewers are always free. Hope that helps! Jaime

Well the “done” ones stay on there. I could create a rule to automatically delete them after a month, I suppose. It’s a combination to-do list and project management.

Congrats on the update - you guys are going huge! Thanks a lot for the credits and recognition as community member. :slight_smile:

Agree with the general sentiment here that the pricing curve is too steep for freelancers or small businesses that have very few makers but lots of client interactions. Good to see you’re open to rethink this use case.

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I posted this on the blog post but this thread seems to be getting more traction and correspondence.

As a new, small video game studio, this pricing model will negatively impact us. The “Team” tier fits our business needs, which is $30 per “Maker”. We have a team of 10 right now so we could fit everyone under two Makers, but we then would shifted the responsibility for all documents to be made by only two people. That’s a crushing burden for those two people.

On small teams, people wear many hats typically. Most of our people will need to make their own documents. All from very different disciplines, art, programming, QA, production, HR, etc… This pricing model essentially prices us into $30 per person. When alternatives are available at much more reasonable rates, we’re being priced out.

It’s disheartening because today was the day I was set to roll out our Coda plans to the team and now I’m having to rethink what our solution is going to be. I don’t want to rethink it, I like your product. But this model hamstrings small teams like ours.

I do appreciate the attempt to try a new pricing model. It just doesn’t make sense for us. I hope you reconsider your pricing strategy for smaller teams.

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One word about your pricing scheme: BARGAIN!

You guys get it! You fully understand the nature of the three information personas:

  • Makers
  • Producers
  • Consumers

Thank You!

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One key aspect of Coda is the API and the ability to automate the creation of new apps using a fair bit of sub-classing of templates, reusable components, and the API. Perhaps you need to invest in process and tools for your lead makers. Doing so will keep your costs down (in the long run) and likely produce more favorable outcomes because good development practices are typically not easily infused into every team member.

Perhaps every team member in your company should toil over learning every aspect of Coda, but it’s my experience that aiming for horizontal expertise is not necessarily ideal in every situation.

Two requests

  • Cross Doc on pro tear
  • Ability to have public input into a doc
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Is there a simple way of telling how many “lines” and “objects” my doc has?

Two questions.

  1. With coda 2.0 Paid plan does it improve iOS app capabilities and able to handle larger tables?
  2. Will the paid plan be able to comfortably handle 50,000+ rows in a table?
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Cant understand why Cross-doc and Doc-protection are not in Pro model. They are such essential things, even in a two person team.

Personally I don’t want any packs or automations, but heavily use formulas. To me Team pricing is not justifiable.

We are just two persons using Coda just like Google Sheets, but the concept of Views, and single formulas through out the column is so much liberating and reason about.

If at least Doc-protection is not coming to Pro pricing, we might have to go back to Google Sheets.

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I was also searching for this … And to know the answer, I created a free workspace and moved some of my docs there then in the docs (Doc settings) I found this info…

Which lead me to a suggestion : As anyone can create free workspace(s) and put docs there, it would be interesting to always have that info about the limitations of a doc on hand (the number of objects, etc… for any doc, on paid and free workspaces), so even if we create a doc in a paid workspace we know if a doc can be put on a free workspace or not before moving it there and then discovering it’s already too big :thinking:

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Thanks!

To the Coda team I’ll add my 2 p., with same message as other commenters: I am a single, nonbusiness user with no viewers and editors, and although I love Coda it’s hard to justify $120/year. I’d happily pay somewhat and accept the restriction of having just a single document, no size restriction.

I also am a single, non-business user for personal use. I feel we’ve been left out in the cold. I think Coda is great and have been using it since almost the beginning. They should absolutely be charging for the product and I have no problem with paid services. But $120 a year is just too steep for my purposes. I think a less expensive single user personal plan without restrictions would be very popular.

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Curious as to why an Admin user can’t edit Docs? I’m need to control the users for my team as well as make changes to Docs. Right now, I have to downgrade myself to contribute to our docs, which means no one is an Admin…