We’ve received several comments, questions, and concerns about the changes that makers can expect with Coda 2.0. We designed the Free plan to accommodate many of the most common interactions people enjoy with Coda, and you can expect additional free features in the future. This is just the beginning of Coda 2.0.
Your feedback is invaluable and is a key component of our decision making here at Coda. We always relied on your voice and would like to hear more about your specific scenarios and how we can help you make them work with our current model. If you are interested, please share your feedback with us at help@coda.io with the title “Community and Pricing” so it gets routed directly to the pricing team.
Thanks for reaching out, Jaime. As it might be of interest to others, I’ve copied part of the email I just sent below:
Now I’ve given it some additional thought and I kind of get the argument that ‘Airtable, etc. are doing it too (maybe even worse)’. Speaking for myself and probably a substantial amount of other users though, Airtable has never been an actual alternative and not just because of the pricing.
What sets Coda apart from all the others is the ability to make powerful but very user-friendly docs through the use of buttons, layouts, etc. When working with clients (who you do not want to train to use a particular piece of software) this is essential. This, in my view, puts Coda in a market of its own.
Herein also lies the current problem however: it’s very hard to justify paying for clients as if they are coworkers/employees. After all, they only use the doc as they would any regular app (remember your tagline😁), i.e. push some buttons and record some data every week (not alter its functionality/layout). I feel that your pricing model should accommodate this uniqueness of your great product rather than bastardize the model of purely internal software.
Agreed with all of this. We hadn’t considered making docs for our clients, but the ability to do that would be a huge benefit.
That being said - paying for editors (AKA button clickers) is probably my biggest objection as well. We have a lot of times where someone may only need to edit once or twice a year. This also requires the admin to have a full view of who needs to edit docs and when. Making such detailed, account-wide paywall permissions seems impossible to manage for larger companies.
In addition, the doc-maker model for teams seems to be confusing as well. In theory, this would act as a super-powered replacement for the Google Docs suite, but if we don’t have the power for the whole team to make documents, we’ll never be able to get company-wide buy in and people will revert back to what they know as a standard.
Coda is an extremely innovative company and I don’t want to undervalue the app, because it should certainly come at a cost. I had just hoped it would be more competitive.
+1 to everything said here. Our team will easily be priced out due to the large quantity of clients/customers who are simply pushing a button etc. Can’t pay $6/customer
Especially frustrating when the entire essence of Coda is the customer interaction abilities through the app etc.
Agree completely with @Gretta_Wallace1. I think there needs to be some distinction drawn between people editing a document and those that will simply interact with the document by clicking a checkbox or a button or entering data into the existing structure.
How can Coda replace Google Docs when Gmail is required to login? The cost for my company to implement Coda appears to be $5/user per month for Google for business and then $30/per user per month for Coda.
The price calculator seems to show that it comes out to about $5 per user with various scenarios. Why not keep it simple and just charge $5 per user per month and allow free read-only access of documents?
Please could you allow 1 document for every account holder to be free. Using Coda just as a todo app should not have to cost $10 a month if the sole purpose of a Coda user is to use it as GTD to do list with integrations including Google Calendar. Having the option for 1 document (with integrations including Google Calendar etc) would also give users a better taste before deciding to create more documents and pay the $10 after the first free document.
I just sent in an email to Coda. Rather than share the whole thing, here are a few of my sentiments that I haven’t yet seen in a public forum:
Coda is an amazing, empowering product, but this plan is regressive and doesn’t align with my experience with Coda which has been community-oriented and spurred by big, outside-the-box thinking.
I wish Coda approached pricing more like streaming platforms. Low monthly cost–1 cup of coffee–that users ultimately forget about and happily continue to pay for occasional access.
I think Coda underestimates the learning curve required to get started with Coda. It takes a while to master the program and unlock its potential. I haven’t had luck getting teams I work with to use Coda because they don’t understand what’s so awesome about it. A person needs to want to learn Coda to stay with it long enough to understand it. The current pricing plan doesn’t encourage people to want to learn. It will make them frustrated that their formulas don’t work, and they won’t take the time to realize that they’re adding a date to text, for example.
I came to the site this weekend to get started on a big idea I had for a doc… When I discovered the news of Coda’s pricing, I was discouraged. I felt like it wasn’t worth it, and I began to think of life after Coda. I hope Coda will take the spirit of these suggestions and approach pricing with a more progressive strategy.
I agree with Phil that there is quite a steep learning curve in order to use Coda.
I agree with Rushabh_Maide that at least 1 document for every account holder should be free with no restrictions such as packs and automations. This will allow people to try out the full capabilities of what Coda can do and there are many soloist out there using Coda just as a GTD. Capturing this market will help to spread Coda’s user base.
Or a lifetime plan with no limits for 1 user will be ideal.
I agree with many others that the current pricing plan of Coda is not competitive.
After spending many hours learning to use Coda, I am now forced to migrate all my data away from Coda to another more reasonably priced alternative.
I hope that you will be able to give your early adopters a special arrangement to procure a lifetime plan or something so we won’t have to migrate out.
Love the product (and yes, there is a steep learning curve that I’m still grappling with).
I was thinking of using this for personal & work use, and was looking forward to paying for it, but the 300% price jump from “Pro” to “Teams” and the difference in what these packages offer makes no sense for me as a solo user.
Help me understand:
Why is there a pricing barrier on integrating certain external services and not others? The way this is done doesn’t give me a lot of confidence around cost stability as future integrations are introduced.
Why is Cross Doc not available on all paid plans? As a solo user, it will cost me THREE TIMES as much just to get access to this feature?
If “Pro” had all pack integrations included & Cross Doc, then it would be an easy BUY from me, but as it stands I’ll be sticking with Notion.
Hi
Introducing price to a free product will cause friction and narrow the user base so after dealing with the fact that we all rather prefer a free product. I am myself a startup founder and as painful as it is , put a price is needed not just for obvious reasons but to focus the product use cases.
So let´s deal with the situation to make coda achieve its potential as a game changer.
My use case scenario is to design sales workflows for IPro and Startups , as an actionable CRM with automated interactions integrated with Hubspot, Linkedin and whatever stack the customer use .
IMHO I see 2 key elements ( among many others) to maximize the spread of docs and the user base
1- How to share a document ( large and complex -so above free tier)
a) To improve it ; you need a (easy/scalable) way to have docs where a people can all work on improve the same version. The option of each copying a version does not bring much to the original creator.
It could be just sharing a few docs with a few people ( with o without Pro )
if a PRO share/collaborate with another PRO just don´t charge twice ¡ ( I understand user pays for each workspace they belong to , so If each Pro share each a paying doc , the bill will be double ¡ so … just don’t charge to share/collaborate in doc among users in a paid plan
b) To test / light use/ Interact ; When one builds and share a doc( again above the free tier) with people NEW to Coda , it is a HUGE entry barrier to ask them (or you) to pay 5/6$ - for users that will just hit a button , add/modify their data or just testing the water . I understand this is a touch one for Coda as most business users will be light ones and want to charge them , but for Growth you need people to get hook to the product before charging and view only does not hook .
so my 2 cents of ideas ;
make them ( interactive users) free at this point to maximize reach ( re-visit it in a few months)
make each document ( not matter size) free for at least 14 days for each user
make bundles to get extra interactive users at a nominal price ( like cents…less than 1$ ) so people can have 50 users at a reasonable price for SaaS
The other key element to get "viral " growth is your community. Coda is an open canvas to craft any business need into an app … so the makers are the key and you have to incentivize them , make the win with you . I heard you are planning a referral program but the pricing structure has a essential influence in the success of a channel program - makers have to be able to earn a decent income if you want them to fully commit to design coda solutions for all the business out there . Business will required custom efforts not just a template.
So facilitate the initial design & testing of interactive users( previous points) AND get a revenue share scheme that make worthy going after complex deals
I am sure there are many considerations but a community that shows a keen interest in investing their personal time to fight for your product is a precious force that steered the right way can flood the word …
and congrats for a great product
Hearing all the suggestions above, I would like to share mine:
should have an referral program
pro and team plan should both have the same functionalities (all packs, cross docs, permissions controls)
pro plan could have a price as is of 10 dolars a month but would be limited to few editors not able to increase
team plan could have options to include not just paid editors but “light editors” for free and would be the only way to increase makers and editors users after pro plan.
Before taking further modification of pricing model, ask community to vote on.
Excited to get to talk to the team and discuss solutions to the pricing model and its relationship to our current docs. @jaime Thank you for the opportunity team!
Coda has always impressed me with their acceptance of customer feedback (although noted by some in the forums that it would be nice to have a specific portal for reporting bugs/features).
Thanks for the feedback @Josh_Szwarga and the pricing team learnt a lot from you. @BenLee is exploring options to log feature request better.
Currently all the bugs reported under https://community.coda.io/c/suggestionbox/bugs are filed in our internal tracker.
Keep the feedback coming as we all work together to make this place better.
Because of the new Coda pricing scheme one Googles for alternatives. Thsi is what i found about Notion.so. I like Coda much more then Notion, but the Notion pricing scheme is very much to my liking.
