Proposed changes to plans, pricing page

[corywatilo]

The purpose of the changes in this wireframe is to make the PostHog free tier more interesting, while allowing us to charge paid users from event #1.

Summary

• A completely free plan that offers access to all products, with usage restrictions
• Adds limit to some features (like Annotations)
• No free tier for the paid plan, as the benefits of the paid tier is unlimited access to all features
• Essentially "adding a card" puts you on the pay-per-use plan
• Plan names that say what they mean: Free and Pay-per-use - no need to translate: "What does Starter or Scale mean?"
• Feature parity between Pay-per-use and Enterprise, with Enterprise offering additional benefits

(Background context for making these changes and adding functionality to the free tier is available here.)

Other notes

• The wire shows a couple callouts that would be shown on hover, one for the Enterprise plan, another for each feature, where you can hover to read details about that feature
• Reduced pricing links would reveal the pricing breakdown inline
• iOS/Android session recording limit placeholder, exact number TBD

[kappa90]

Does this mean that we would not stop offering the self-serve enterprise option we currently have?

I read Reduced pricing after first 2m / events, does this mean the pricing tiers would change? Is there a proposed new breakdown somewhere?

@raquelmsmith I think we have implemented numerical limitations in the features, but not monthly numerical (1 experiment / month), we should do that, it would probably take just an extra attribute in the plans API

[corywatilo]

Does this mean that we would not stop offering the self-serve enterprise option we currently have?

These are all Cloud-specific. The one piece this doesn't mention is Open Source, but given the focus on Cloud, it might make sense to mention it somewhere but link to another page that explains what ships with it.

does this mean the pricing tiers would change?

Same breakdowns as we have today. Maybe it should say Volume discounts available after X like we have today

[timgl]

I think a lot of this makes sense, but some of it is different from the current pricing experimentation roadmap. Perhaps it's easier to propose pricing changes into that RFC instead?

[camerondeleone]

Would be helpful to add a row to the matrix with "support" to differentiate Enterprise from Standard, and clarify the minimum spend for a channel ($2K/month). (Relatedly, @simfish85 we should make sure we are charging $2k min for Enterprise, since we do have extant slack channels we're supporting with only the min $450 spend)

[raquelmsmith]

Relatedly, @simfish85 we should make sure we are charging $2k min for Enterprise, since we do have extant slack channels we're supporting with only the min $450 spend

Wait so is the base price for enterprise now $2k/mo?? 😅

[raquelmsmith]

I really like the direction here of putting the free stuff we offer front-and-center. Definitely a hole in the current pricing page. I'm currently working on hooking up the posthog.com/pricing page to the billing service so we can modify plans from there and then have it magically ✨ show up appropriately on posthog.com/pricing. As I am doing that I will incorporate some of the changes you've suggested here @corywatilo, and then we can review that against your mock above and see what else can be changed.

As for the plan changes, many of those things are things we've proposed experimenting with in the pricing roadmap Tim linked to. Definitely like the idea of making experiments and feature flags more available on the free plan. I recently wrote up https://posthog.com/handbook/engineering/feature-pricing to define how we price features and make them available for different plans - making sure almost everything can be experienced for free is definitely part of that. I also wrote up an RFC for changing the plan names because I agree that right now they are confusing - can you @corywatilo leave your thoughts here? https://github.com/PostHog/meta/pull/87

[kappa90]

I was literally typing what Raquel just wrote ☝️

We are currently working on many of the proposals of this issue, what we have been lacking though was a design input on how to show some of the proposed changes, on this page and in the product, so I welcome this issue.

For the future, I'd love to coordinate more, so we don't duplicate our work, as it seems like we're coming up with the same ideas (great minds think alike?)

[andyvan-ph]

I really like this simplicity of this. Some random thoughts:

• Under Experiments, I think it would be worth adding the types of targeting and tests we support – A/B and multivariate, target on properties etc. As I found when I wrote about Optimize alternatives, VWO limits their free tier to A/B tests and device targeting only. Good to point out that, while you only get 1 per month for free, we don't limit functionality.

• What does 'Limited' path analysis mean exactly? Better to be explicit. Also, out of interest, why limit this insight type specifically?

• While we're limiting the free plan to 1 dashboard, I assume the number of insights is unlimited? If so, we should add that as a balance against the 1 dashboard limit. I'd feel much better that limit if I knew I could create as many individual insights as I like.

• I think we might be danger of making the free tier for feature flags and experiments look a bit stingy. GrowthBook is unlimited on both on their free tier – they price per seat. LaunchDarkly is just $10 per seat for unlimited flags. I don't feel especially strongly about this, but thought it worth flagging.

[joethreepwood]

My main thought is that, as a user, if I'm considering a pay-per-use plan then the most important page element to me is the pricing calculator...which is at the very bottom of the page.

[simfish85]

Wait so is the base price for enterprise now $2k/mo??

I think this discussion will trigger that yes - publicly we should put a minimum spend on the Enterprise plan (maybe position it as $20k a year rather than $2k a month as we want people on an Enterprise plan to be annual by default).

In practice we may create Slack channels for customers who are non Enterprise/below that spend but with high growth potential at our discretion.

[andyvan-ph]

My main thought is that, as a user, if I'm considering a pay-per-use plan then the most important page element to me is the pricing calculator...which is at the very bottom of the page.

Fwiw, this doesn't bother me.