Pricing, Tension, and Trust

This post is not about the pricing tables.

It is about the tension underneath them… and how we try to manage that tension without breaking trust on either side.

The tension is real, and both sides are right

Clients want frictionless service. They want to come and go as they wish. They want flexibility. They want to pay as little as they reasonably can. They do not want to think about contracts, tiers, or billing models more than absolutely necessary. All of that is rational.

LMS vendors want something different. We want predictability. We want to know roughly what our budget looks like next year. We want to know how many resources we need to run the system well.

And yes, while I need predictability, so does my hosting provider. If you think I am a stickler for predictable loads, you should meet the people billing us for processors, bandwidth, and storage.

That tension does not go away by pretending one side is wrong. Both sides are right. The only real question is how you deal with it honestly.

Transparency instead of choreography

One thing we are very deliberate about is removing sales choreography from pricing.

We really want you as a client, but your budget is your business. We have no idea what you can afford, but we do know exactly what it costs us to provide this service, build a system for the future, and make a couple of well-earned shekels in the process.

We use three models because uncertainty comes in different forms.

We do not believe there is one "correct" pricing model. What we see instead are three different kinds of uncertainty.

Bending over backwards for balance

For a long time, we let annual clients slide into cheaper tiers mid-term as soon as their usage crossed a threshold. It felt friendly, but it actually taught clients to underestimate their needs on purpose. It created a disincentive for honesty, which isn't healthy for a partnership.

So we changed the structure to protect our side, but then we bent over backwards to make sure it was fair to yours.

Now, we allow one no-penalty "true-up" mid-renewal. If you realize you should have bought at a higher level, you can jump to that level mid-term without a penalty—you just pay the difference you would have paid anyway. We always allow changes at the annual renewal, but this mid-term option brings the balance back. We took away what was unfair to us and added an option that ensures it's never unfair to you.

Even our contract is designed for balance

We don’t want to talk to your lawyers. We really don’t.

To avoid that, we’ve designed our contracts to be as close to "yes" as possible before they even reach your desk. We’ve already pushed the edge of what we can give in terms of protections and fairness. We pre-negotiated with ourselves so that we wouldn't have to spend weeks debating a simple sale.

We want to spend that time on your implementation, not on redlines.

What we actually want:

Twenty years changes how you think about this. It’s long enough to see pricing fads come and go, and long enough to know that clarity beats novelty every time.

We are not trying to be the cheapest LMS. We are trying to be fair, transparent, and boring in the right places, so the contract is never the reason you don't pick us.

So go ahead and pick us already :-)

Signed,
Douglas Wallace Co-Founder and CEO