We’re updating our pricing for the first time in over a year. Despite our product focus changing a lot, our pricing has remained the same since we sunsetted our full-stack web app and website builder mid-2021. When we set our pricing last July, our focus was on no-code client portals to centralise customer interactions. Things have changed a lot since then (for the better).
From the very start of our journey, we’ve been super transparent about our wins, learnings and challenges building Noloco. Some of you have followed our Founder Updates from the very start and have experienced all the highs and lows with us. So we want to be as transparent as possible with you about our pricing and why we have to make changes to better serve our customers and build a sustainable business.
We want to ensure that new customers starting out with Noloco are able to get value from the platform and see its full potential before having to commit to a paid subscription. However, we found that our entry-level plans were a bit too restrictive for customers to get significant value from the platform. After their free trial, customers who converted on a lower tier would either need to upgrade to a higher plan or they might churn.
This didn’t make sense for us or our customers. So we’ve decided to get rid of our two cheapest paid plans (‘Start’ & ‘Pro’) and replace them instead with a free tier. This means that new customers will be able to try out the platform for free for as long as they need to and upgrade once they outgrow the free plan.
One of the mistakes we made with our previous pricing model was essentially having no limits on usage across standard plans. The majority of our customers paid us the exact same amount regardless of the value they were getting from the platform or the resources they were consuming - whether it was the number of apps, records, users or workflows.
This means that those more established businesses with larger usage and those getting the most value from the platform often ended up paying the same amount as smaller businesses with less usage who get less value from the platform.
Clearly this set-up isn’t fair. As a platform, we need to price our services in a way that those customers who are getting more value from the platform and who are using more resources pay more. This allows us to keep costs more affordable for smaller organisations.
You can learn about our new pricing structure and limits on our pricing page. At this point, it’s worth calling out the following: we expect that the vast majority of our customers will be unaffected by these changes based on their current usage. Yep, we ran the numbers.
High-level, these are the the most noteworthy changes that are coming:
As mentioned in the FAQs below for existing customers, there will be a three month grace period where your current limits will stay in place until 1st December 2022.
Of course, we know you’ll have questions about some of the specifics here - so we’ve put together a support guide with more information about how the pricing and overages will work.
I mentioned above that our previous pricing set-up wasn’t fair as price was somewhat unrelated to usage and value. There’s a couple of things we’re implementing with our new pricing structure to make things more fair.
When chatting to customers, one common wish that kept coming up was the ability to customise what you pay for. This makes total sense. Some customers might need more than one app; others might need more builders and others again might need more team members. Due to the variety of different use cases and types of businesses building apps with Noloco, it’s no surprise that people value different things. For that reason, we’re going to introduce flexible pricing through overages.
What this means is that if you want to go above plan limits in one area but don’t yet want to upgrade, you can choose to pay more for those specific resources you need through overages (that will be automatically billed at the end of the monthly billing cycle). This applies to live apps, builders, team members, active users and workflows.
We know that some of our customers use Noloco for customer-facing or partner-facing apps where some users are outside your organisation. We also know that many of our customers love the fact that they don’t have to pay for each one of these users to access their apps (in comparison to many other platforms that focus on per-user pricing).
We are going to set limits on app users, but only active users. This means that we’ll specifically look at those app users who have at least one session in your app over the course of the monthly billing cycle. So if you typically only expect customers to log in a couple of times per year, you won’t be paying for all of them, all the time. And if you’re just getting started and have connected your user list from an external data source, these users won’t be counted until they use your app.
We know pricing changes can be scary and frustrating. Hopefully, if you’ve got all the way to the end of this blog post, you’ll understand why this is a necessary step for us to build a sustainable company at Noloco and to support our customers and their growth over the long run.
If you have any questions about your plan, you can reach out to support@noloco.io.
We’re putting in place a 3 month grace period for existing customers who subscribed to paid plans before 1st September 2022, where your current limits will stay in place until 1st December 2022. New customers will only be able to access new plans from 1st September 2022.
Those on the Start or Pro plans will be automatically upgraded to the Team plan on 1st December 2022. If you want to go down to the Free plan instead, that’s no problem - you can do so from your Billing page or contact us at support@noloco.io.
Those on annual plans will continue to receive the same pricing and limits until the end of their annual subscription period, after which they will be automatically migrated over to new pricing.
You can now monitor your exact usage relative to your plan limits from your Billing page so you know where you stand.
Those on the Team or Scale plan who are above the new usage limits will be charged overages from 1st December 2022. Overages are not available on the free plan.For those who are above limits where overages are not available (e.g. number of records), we will be in contact about upgrading your account to a Scale or Custom plan.
You can find the answer to many other FAQs in our support guide. For any other questions about your plan, you can contact support@noloco.io.