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

Is the pricing calculator wrong here: https://coda.io/pricing ?

The text says you get 5 editors for each doc maker, but it seems like 6 in the calculator… is that because you count the doc makers as one of the 6?

That effectively limits community-built docs or wikis to free docs.

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Indeed it’s not possible to share a doc for asking questions to the community anymore. Fee risk is too high

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@Dalmo_Mendonca @Juan_Luis_Chulilla - you will always have a free workspace with as many collaborators as you need. It is easy to move a doc in there and then move it out within 14 days - so even large docs can be worked on.

But I am thinking through other option to both allowing community members to try new upcoming features and also easily and freely help each other.

You’ve seen us build and iterate so provide feedback and work with us. I’ll be reaching out to folks to discuss this more so feel free to message me here if you want to collaborate on this.

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My use case currently is for tracking Cub Scouts dues and fundraising (85 of them currently). We run our group on donations and fundraising, so any expense is hard to justify. Since Coda works so well for this I’ve signed up for the Pro plan on my personal dime (donating $144/yr to pay for Coda will sting my wallet but it’s definitely light-years beyond Google Sheets). Today we were already at 194% of our quotas before I subscribed…

One thing I’ve noticed is that the Doc Protection permissions and locking is on the Team plan, and to get that functionality I’ll have to spend $432 per month just to keep members of our leadership from accidentally deleting an important table or wiping-out rows!!! We definitely need an affordable way to keep the structure solid and give simple editing abilities to less-confident users; I have been describing Coda as “amazing but extremely fragile” to our leadership, and I’ve held off completely on giving edit abilities to anyone else…

I see that you are planning to offer something for non-profits. As I said before $144 is high for our group but I’m planning to pay it for now; something around half of that would be more justifiable for us (I might even convince our leadership to pay instead of eating the cost myself!) Also, qualifying as a non-profit on some other services looked like it would take jumping through hoops to achieve, so I hope Coda can keep that to a minimum (we are but a small branch of the national Scouting organization, so providing documentation will be extremely difficult).

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That seems likely. It isn’t totally clear whether Doc Makers are included in Editors but it appears they are. Maybe some clarification on that page is in order?

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Yup, in that case 6 is the total number of people on your team, out of which 1 of them is the Doc Maker. For every Doc Maker on the Team plan, you get 5 free Editors, which is 6 people in total.

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Makes sense. Perhaps the page should be updated to say:

A team of 30 with 5 of them Doc Makers would cost…

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If I just use for me only, how much should I pay per month?

Depending what you need : It’s either 12$ or 36$ /months
(10$ - 30$ /months if you pay annually which means it’s 120$ - 360$ /year instead of 144$ - 432$/year)

Congrats Codans on the release. Thanks for the credits for being a part of the community. Love the new functionality. Your new release cadence is inspiring. That said, pricing is confusing. I think cross-doc should be a Pro feature. I’ll upgrade to pro, and in the meantime I’ll rely on Google App Script to pipe data from one doc to a Google Sheet and back into other doc.

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Hey Codas, Community… here are my 2 cents as well, yes… a bit late, but it’s never too late :slight_smile:

First of all, before commenting (complaining :sweat_smile: ) about the price model I would give a big shout out to the team and their 2.0 of Coda…I have been waiting for this day for months and constantly checking Twitter and the community…

The amazing team behind Coda has created a tool with endless possibilities and now it’s time to start reaping the benefits of what the team has created. So thanks a lot Codans!

Now, as mentioned, a few thoughts about the price model, the only “dark side” that is coming out from the VOICE of the community and from myself:

PRICE MODEL: A TOP DOWN DECISION

Compared to all the features that you’ve developed so far (bottom up approach: we asked, you listened, and the magic happened), The price model you set up seems the only thing you’ve created using a top down approach. It was something unexpected by the vast majority of people here! I mean, of course we were expecting to pay at some point but the concern now is HOW. It doesn’t fit!

UNDERSTANDING YOUR USERS

I think that the big (mistake?!?) that probably you’ve done was to focus mainly to a certain type of users: companies/enterprises/teams
In fact it seems that you started creating your prices around companies & teams and then you extended those prices, with absolute minimal considerations , to the rest (solo users, startups, makers with small businesses, students, educational, personal use, etc…).
This approach created big pains to, I would say, 50/60% of your customer base (even though, reading this thread, it seems 80/90%)

Now, I don’t want to complain, complain and complain, I would give some proposals hoping you’ll take this into consideration:

INTRODUCING THE LIGHT EDITOR (or call it whatever you want)
Basically what is really missing and/or what makes us really uncomfortable, is that we (makers?) have to pay for each person who is interacting in a very basic basic way with our docs (even pushing a button or inserting a text in a table) plus even when those people interacts a few times (one time?) a year!
Well, this is simply unfair!. I consider CODA also as an evolution of a Spreadsheet… Imagine if you had to pay for each “simple” edit in your spreadsheet…this is not sustainable!
Light Editors should have very limited permission (they can’t add columns/can’t change views of a table/can’t insert controls,buttons/can’t see formulas/can’t edit formulas etc…).
Light Editors hence should be free and should not count in the Maker’s bills cause they can’t do nothing in the doc neither see/change the structure/formulas. At least they should bee free in the Pro/Team plan and can have some 0.XX$ cost for the Enterprise plan (when Coda is used in a big company)

This category will fix the “pain in the ass” when, for example, you would create a Survey with Coda and 1000 other use cases…and will make a clear distinction between “real editors/contributors” and “lite users”.

REVENUE SHARE
Because prices have been built around big companies/teams and I think you missed a huge opportunity around the B2M2B (Business to Maker To Business) or B2M2C (Business to Maker to Consumer).
Ok, I invented those acronyms, but think about it. With Coda makers can potentially create everything (CRMs, ERPs, PM Tools, complex software tools, etc… ). Companies can pay a lot of money for such software and should buy single software for different needs.
Makers can create very sophisticated software based on Coda and “resell” them to companies. That said, what if you launched a “Maker Revenue Sharing Program” with plans that will be free, or almost free for makers that create docs, and charge only the “use” of the Docs, not the Maker. Like it happens for the Apple Store or Google Play Store you’ll, you’ll get 20/30% of the price companies will pay to the maker (or whatever % will fit the business case…)

PRICE MODEL PROPOSALS

FREE: (suitable for first time/occasional/personal/ users)
1 Editor
10 Lite Editors
Unlimited Viewers
Doc Size Limits Remains

PRO - 4$/Month (suitable for power users/heavy personal stuff/some makers)
2 Editors included (1$ for any additional editor)
Unlimited Lite Editors OR 500 Active Lite Editors (Active = at least once a month)
Unlimited Viewers
Limited Automations
Limited permission/locking functionalities
NO Enterprise/Business Oriented packs etc
CrossDoc included (a PRO without CrossDoc is not a PRO, sorry but CrossDoc is a must. Imagine them like the Linked Database in Notion - Sorry for the competitor… )

Team - 8$/Month (suitable for startups, small team, small teams, some makers,super power users)
5 Editors included ( 2$ for each additional editor )
Unlimited Lite Editors OR 500 Active Lite Editors (Active = at least once a month) OR 0.05$ per Active Lite Editor
Unlimited Viewers
Business Oriented Packs included
CrossDoc included
Full permission/locking functionalities

Enterprise - Custom

Maker Program/ Maker Marketplace / Coda Store
Special pricing for Super Makers that build complex Docs for other companies and sell those docs in a special “Coda Store”. Those Makers can basically pay a little fee (kind of the Pro account 4$/Month but will have all the super powers unblocked: Permissions/Business packs etc…). Makers will set (on their own, the price of the Doc (one time amount + monthly amount) based on certain minimum parameters set by Coda) and Coda will get 20/30/40/50 % of the revenue (Honestly I don’t know now…). All the companies in the world will surf the marketplace and can decide to buy a Doc that suits their own need (with a 7 day free trial approach?)

ops those were not only 2 cents… probably something more i know… :woozy_face:

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@Jack_DePew,

A little off tropic, but it’s unnecessary to pipe data into a sheet and back to a different doc.

Just build the script to read from Coda into an App Script array and write the same array back to the other Coda doc. It’s also pretty straight-forward to build an incremental sync.

If you have large numbers of records - more than can be processed in the 6-minute apps script ceiling - you can cache the data in the script itself and chip away at the sync process over time using triggers.

PipeDream can do this pretty effectively as well.

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No, it is not.

The Pro tier should have a limited amount of doc crossing and a limited amount of locking. $10 per month without that is unacceptable.

These are the two features that everybody was waiting for. Giving them from the team tier only, for $30 per month, means you are telling us goodbye.

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@Francesco_Pistillo Thanks for sharing this. I shared an alternative pricing strategy with the Coda team that resembles this one.

I have one concern with your suggestion: Why you would limit automations at the Pro tier (especially because you see the value of including Cross Docs).

  • As a solo user, automations are a KEY differentiator between Coda and its competitors (most notably Notion).
  • Automations would also presumably be part of many Pro Maker offerings, so if your automation counts are limited, your app can’t scale.
  • Finally, they have little to do with the distinctions between Coda for Teams and Coda for individuals (as opposed to permissions or shared workspace, for example).

Again, as a follow Coda user, I appreciate your thoughtfulness!

EDIT: Here’s my point… A single row-based automation in a single doc that is triggered 3-4 times a day will use 100 row-based automation runs in a month – which is the limit on the free plan. Now if you had just 10 docs with a single automation running on that kind of schedule, you are using 1,0000 automation runs in a month – twice as many row-based automation runs permitted in the $144 Pro plan.

Hey @John_Beaudoin_Jack this is just a proposal of course :slight_smile: i wrote down some “food for thoughts” to the team as well as the community instead of "complaning ":slight_smile:

About your concern, I didn’t say to remove Automations from the PRO tier but I was a bit conservative about it. In fact I left some limitation about the Automation for the PRO tier cause it can “encourage” PRO users to update the plan when they will have “presumably” a team.

Compared to CrossDoc which I consider Vital for PRO Users, Automations sometimes can be avoided (especially to update some status in some other tables…you can do that with a direct formula) plus probably the thing we can propose to the team is to increase the number of automation for the PRO users :slight_smile:

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All good points! But I will still lobby (hard) for unlimited automation for the Pro Tier – I will never be on a team again (freelance for life!)… :wink:

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Can see how that is confusing - yeah, each doc maker on the team plan comes with 5 editors so it is actually six people. Whereas each editor that goes over your quota of free editors costs 1/5 the price of a doc maker. So if you have a ton of editors it is actually more economical to add more doc makers than to just go over your editor quota.

This is something we should clarify. Also thinking if there is a way to simplify the logic here.

Another thought for @JeremyOlson @BenLee @mallika @oleg
As Coda goes through this process of listening to its user on pricing, one goodwill gesture might be to restore us as full beta users through Dec. 1 instead of limiting us to the free tier until we subscribe. I have some work on new docs that I would really like to undertake (which I think shows my faith in Coda’s future) but I’m holding off on subscribing because of the uncertainty.

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My main issue with all of this is how it was presented to the community. I would like to see how, and whether, Coda is going to change it’s communication now that the product is no longer free. @BenLee

I tried to outline my issue here: Coda's New Pricing & Comments on Transparency