New pricing model for future Transloadit customers
We have made big announcements whenever we lowered our pricing, so we feel it is only fair to do the same when we go the other way.
Transloadit is a bootstrapped company and we strongly believe in open source. We are trying hard to make strides in our quest for bringing the world better file uploads. At the same time, however, we have a strong ambition to remain self-sufficient and to pay for the next advancement with the last.
As we are still heavily investing into uppy.io and tus.io, while already having our next ambitious project in the pipeline, we were faced with a difficult decision:
- Reduce / abandon our ambitions
- Take a loan / seek investment
- Experiment with a new pricing model that can sustain our desired level of innovation
As the title of this post indicates, we have been trying the latter of these three options.
Old pricing
This is what our old pricing table used to look like:
| Plan | Monthly price | GB | Overage | Concurrency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sandbox | $0 | 2 GB total | n/a | 2 |
| Startup | $19 | 7 GB/mo | $3.00 | 5 |
| Small Business | $49 | 20 GB/mo | $2.75 | 20 |
| Medium Business | $99 | 50 GB/mo | $2.50 | 60 |
| Enterprise | 📞 | 📞 | 📞 | 📞 |
New pricing
Inspired by Patrick McKenzie’s thinking on SaaS pricing, for some time now, when new customers looked at our pricing page, they would see these numbers instead:
| Plan | Monthly price | GB | Overage | Concurrency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sandbox | $0 | 2 GB total | n/a | 2 |
| Startup | $49 | 10 GB/mo | $6.00 | 10 |
| Small Business | $99 | 30 GB/mo | $4.00 | 30 |
| Medium Business | $249 | 150 GB/mo | $2.00 | 90 |
| Enterprise | 📞 | 📞 | 📞 | 📞 |
These are obviously significant changes, yet our experimentation has thus far yielded positive results. To clarify, we have seen no significant negative impact in signup rate. What's more, upon inquiring, the majority of people even told us that they find the new pricing model fitting. As a result of this, it feels almost as if we have been running with the 'wrong' pricing for the past nine years, effectively placing a bottleneck on our ability to innovate.
We hope all of our new customers will agree that our updated pricing model resembles a fair reward for the unique service that we offer. One that helps companies to better leverage their developers, and has been decimating their time to market and server bills.
For those on a budget
In spite of all this, we would like to reassure those of you who enjoy our service while working with a limited budget. Experimenting with Transloadit remains free, as it has always been. Our free Sandbox Plan will remain at 2 GB, giving hackers the opportunity to play around with the Transloadit service without any associated cost.
A free Startup Plan (with 7 GB, replenished every month) will also be available for charities, open source, and other good-doers. We only ask that you use a 'Powered by Transloadit' link when using this plan.
Minimum charges for some Robots
In addition to different price points, we are also introducing a minimum file size for certain Robots. While they will continue to accept files of any size, a few Robots will now always charge at least X bytes for an operation. This is to stop us from losing money on labour by the /html/convert Robot or the /image/facedetect Robot. These typically have modest input and output sizes, yet require intense computational effort on our side (booting a web browser, rendering a page, and detecting human faces is no small feat). As it stands, we have been running thousands of these jobs, while only getting revenue of around a single dollar. We view this as a flaw in our pricing that could potentially bankrupt us - a flaw that we are fixing today.
Here is a list of our features and their respective minimum charges:
| Robot | Minimum charge |
|---|---|
| /audio/artwork | 0 bytes |
| /audio/concat | 0 bytes |
| /audio/encode | 0 bytes |
| /audio/loop | 0 bytes |
| /audio/merge | 0 bytes |
| /audio/waveform | 1 megabyte |
| /azure/store | 0 bytes |
| /cloudfiles/store | 0 bytes |
| /document/thumbs | 500 kilobytes |
| /file/compress | 0 bytes |
| /file/decompress | 0 bytes |
| /file/filter | FREE |
| /file/virusscan | 1 megabyte |
| /ftp/import | 0 bytes |
| /ftp/store | 0 bytes |
| /html/convert | 1 megabyte |
| /http/import | 0 bytes |
| /image/facedetect | 1 megabyte |
| /image/optimize | 0 bytes |
| /image/resize | 0 bytes |
| /media/playlist | 0 bytes |
| /meta/write | 0 bytes |
| /s3/import | 0 bytes |
| /s3/store | 0 bytes |
| /sftp/import | 0 bytes |
| /sftp/store | 0 bytes |
| /upload/handle | 0 bytes |
| /video/adaptive | 0 bytes |
| /video/concat | 0 bytes |
| /video/encode | 0 bytes |
| /video/merge | 0 bytes |
| /video/thumbs | 0 bytes |
| /youtube/store | 0 bytes |
Existing plans are not affected
The new pricing model has been live for a few months already. The reason you probably haven't noticed is that these changes have no impact on existing customers. All of our existing customers are grandfathered in.
This will hopefully address any anxiety you may have around this subject. We appreciate our relationships with existing customers too much to risk them with bold moves like suddenly changing the price of their plan.
In the long term, we do aim to gently persuade our customers towards the new plans, for example by bundling new features there, but you will always have the option to keep your existing plan.
We hope that as customers gradually agree to move onto our new plans, they are doing so with the intent to support our desired pace of innovation and to pave the way for another ten bright years of Transloadit, for all customers.
If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to send us a message or hit the speech bubble right away.
P.S. At Transloadit we're sharing our best inventions with the world for free. If you support our cause, we certainly won't stop you from test driving our new pricing model ahead of schedule! 😍 (We can dream, can't we?)