- could you clarify exactly how you’ll be impacted by the new pricing, and why you feel like that necessitates a “break up”? We love feedback and are happy to listen. Is there a specific alternative that you’re considering?
The most important thing is that I can’t consider Pipedream anymore for onboarding new clients.
The combination of 100 credits/day, 3 connected accounts, and 5 active workflows is seriously limiting the options when developing.
I have like 30 clients on Pipedream, and probably 80% of them would have been impacted by this if they were to be onboarded today.
A break up will soon become necessary as I would like to have all my clients on a single platform.
I am also not very happy with the new interface and developer experience.
Pipedream filled in a market gap years ago, now it’s time for other products to fill in gap that Pipedream is creating.
Maybe moving up the ladder it’s the right thing to do for Pipedream, but with the new pricing you are basically forcing a customer profile change.
Good luck with that!
As for alternatives, sorry, but I won disclose them. They are true gems, as Pipedream was once.
Appreciate the feedback Alexandru, and I have a few specific follow-up questions. I empathize with the frustration, but try to remain open. I’m a founder here and I’m your biggest advocate internally. I hope you can see from years of interaction on this community how we truly care about y’all as devs and customers. I pass all this feedback on to the team, and I try to honestly advocate for your position as we have these discussions.
- Part of the reason we haven’t made a public announcement about the new pricing is that we’re still collecting feedback like this and open to changes. Re: “The combination of 100 credits/day, 3 connected accounts, and 5 active workflows is seriously limiting the options when developing.“, is one limit in particular going to affect your customers more? btw you also don’t get charged for source credits now, so you’d see a significant reduction in credits for any customers using sources (especially polling sources), so the reduction to 100 credits is not as drastic as it seems.
- “I am also not very happy with the new interface and developer experience.” -> Could you tell me more about what’s frustrating specifically? Very happy to see if there’s a workaround to a specific issue / pass feedback on to the team
- “As for alternatives, sorry, but I won disclose them. They are true gems, as Pipedream was once” -> Totally your call, but again, I don’t think you know how much I care, and how much time I’d devote actually looking at the alternatives and passing on any specific feedback to the team. So it would still help to hear if there’s e.g. a pricing structure, or a feature, from one of the platforms you’re using that you really like, etc.
Again, we obviously get the frustration involved in any pricing changes. At the same time, the old pricing model wasn’t sustainable. We’re just humans trying to figure out how to run our business, just like all of you are. So we’re happy to get more feedback, listen, and iterate
It must be late for me as I don’t really get point 1. 90% of my sources are webhooks, so they are probably custom sources, right?
my clients are small and medium businesses & start-ups, they are very careful about bloating their cloud tools expenses, and also very careful when choosing the toolset, as you can imagine. I was able to sell Pipedream as it was initially free and they could worry about scaling up later. they can’t fit now in the 100 credits/day + 3 connected accounts + 5 workflows to start up automated operations.
Just today I had to test a new process and maxed out the 333 runs by mistake, and had to wait for a day to pass to continue testing. I can’t imagine how my workflow would look like with the new limits.
Also, most start-ups rely on cloud tools, mostly with a free tier, until they can scale up: CRM, Project Management, documents management, marketing tools, other productivity tools; the median is probably 5-6 connected accounts, 5-10 workflows, and barely fitting the 333 runs/day.
Also, I have been working in sales in marketing, and I learned that when the pricing is hard to understand, it’s usually a gimmick, a distraction, not customer orientated.
It looks like you have to take orders from a new CFO that is only focused on profitability, and cares less about customer experience.
On point 2, I had a call with Tod at the time you switched to the new interface, I offered my feedback, he basically dismissed my POV, and stated that it is an improvement in developer experience; I didn’t feel that way. I just went along with the new interface and that’s it. It probably doubled my testing and debugging effort. the most annoying is switching between inspector and builder.
on point 3, I totally agree with you that Pipedream is very involved in the community management.
I just feel like I am no longer in your target client profile.
If Pipedream would have allowed me to consolidate all my clients/projects under one auth (don’t tell me about the team feature, I tried it and it’s not a good deal for me), I might have taken the whole cost on me and billed my clients separately. It’s sad that I have to manage ~30 credentials.
The switch from user login to email login also impacted me. I am not even sure how I can log back in to some accounts.
You can imagine that I have one main email address, and I had to create email+client@ accounts to maintain a manageable situation, now that is no longer possible, right? what would be my next option ,creating new email addresses for each client project?! Not really feasible
All in all, in the past 12 months has gone from a predictable cost, affordable and great experience tool to a unpredictable cost, pretty bad developer experience, and largely unaffordable tool.
You are probably targeting bigger clients, not independent developers.
I might just use Firebase functions or any other serverless functions tool on the market, and you can’t beat that with how the new Pipedream looks like.
I owe a lot to Pipedream. I am truly sad this is happening
Very much appreciate that detailed feedback. I think that all makes sense. I’m processing and am going to see if we can address some of these issues. I especially understand the issues re: managing all of your clients effectively within Pipedream.
So if you had a way to manage multiple clients within Pipedream elegantly, and apply your limits to the whole account, would you have signed up for the Advanced plan (for example)? Then you’re getting unlimited resources for all your clients, and the 50,000 credit / usage would apply globally to all client resources? So you have one account, clear isolation between clients, but only pay for one plan across all clients.
(then of course, you could still see the usage per client, per workflow, but billing would be centralized)
can I get a demo or some sort of presentation?
I can’t figure out how it would work in the current interface
I’m also thinking about how would I migrate all my accounts to a consolidated account
I’m not dismissing te offer, it might work after all
thanks for being involved
Pipedream should offer an easy way to scale up from a solo account, to multiple accounts, to a consolidated account, minimize cost for low volume operations (100 credits is still a joke offer; we are using it for testing and offering services to clients who might scale up as their operations grow; this is becoming a barrier), the developer experience is still so so.
If I make money on Pipedream, it’s natural that you should make money too.
You haven’t figured out yet the breaking point.
Naturally, you should have been able to create a win win solution after so many years on the market, you have customer profiles, probably a huge amount of data on how your platform is being used.
It looks like you are still looking for the target client profile, and these sudden shifts are affecting us as users
and you know what else would really interesting?
instead of having us the developers pay 149 or 749 a month, I would rather charge my own clients from Pipedream.
some clients are low volume, some are high volume; as you put it, I would have to take on an overhead to manage billing on my own end.
I’ve reread your landing page, and for me it’s obviously targeted to indie hackers, developers, small and medium companies, while your new pricing is starting to look like enterprise.
some input on this matter would be great.
what is your customer target profile?
Developers at every stage: hobbyists, small / medium businesses, teams at major companies and Enterprises. I think of “Enterprise” as > $100,000 ARR deals, so I’m curious why you think the $29 / $149 per month deals looks like Enterprise pricing. The intent is to have devs pay prices proportional to the value they’re getting from the platform.
It sounds like you think the free tier doesn’t have enough credits to help devs test / get started, which is good feedback. And I hear you that we need to improve the experience for businesses in your position, who manage automations for multiple clients.
I think not many solo developers or freelancers would want to take on such a monthly cost.
you might have a good offer for SMEs, I don’t necessarily agreed with that, I don’t know much about other user profiles on Pipedream.
The current cloud industry is based on start low, scale up when you need
what I am trying to figure out is if I can continue my consulting business using Pipedream as a main tool, or should I migrate to another platform.
I’m trying not to be a bitch, I totally understand your point as a business that has to make money. You probably have about 60-80% of your accounts on free of charge, and trying to filter out the ones that take resources and don’t create revenue.
I don’t want to be in that category>
You probably spent more than enough time on this topic, thanks again.
I’m looking forward to improving my experience, as you do
I really appreciate you being to transparent and honest, since it’s the only way we’ll learn! I’m simmering on the feedback and sharing with the team, appreciate it the time from you, as well.
can you think about an offer for integrators/consultants that sell Pipedream on your behalf?
It’s kind of unfair that you are charging me for selling your platform
We absolutely plan to develop that kind of program! We’ve looked at the programs that Make and others offer here. I completely agree that you should be compensated for bringing paid customers to Pipedream.
I would rather have free access to the platform to work with it so I can sell it than be compensated financially
Would we have the billable relationship with your client in that case? And we’re applying the credits to your account, separate from the client’s?