This topic was automatically generated from Slack. You can find the original thread here.
When did this change? Used to be 10,000 included before you pay for extra credits! That’s a huge change in pricing and I don’t remember any announcements?
Now to bump up to 10,000 it’s an extra $48/month
Hi Callum,
We soft launched this change at the end of October.
Existing customers are not required to switch to the new pricing unless you are looking to upgrade plans.
With the new pricing:
• Unlimited users: We removed the per user licensing and made users free on all subscription tiers
• Reduced platform fees: On the Advanced and Business tier subscriptions the platform fees are significantly lower
There is also a meaningful built in discount schedule for usage as the volume increases.
Thanks - it would have been nice to know about it.
I assessed Pipedream with a client based on the old pricing, but then signed up a few weeks later and only once we’d started building did I realise the change had occured since it was done silently.
Made me look pretty unprofessional, especially being an affiliate
It also fundamentally changes how to think about using pipedream, which is pretty disappointing.
A nice pattern in the past due to generous credits was to loop in one workflow to trigger a 2nd one multiple times (eg get some data that needs something done and then loop over it and do something on each item).
With 10000 credits per month and very cheap additional credits, this was pretty doable within a reasonable cost for a moderate amount of data (say 100 items per day)
Now its only 2000, it’s much harder to justify using that pattern.
This is fine for me as a developer who can write code, but makes it much harder for me to teach clients how to build workflows themselves if they need to do bulk operations, due to chewing threw credits so fast.
The changes also makes pipedream far less appealing compared to, say, Netlify functions which lets you make MANY MANY invocations per month if you pay $19 / month.
One of the big appeals and selling points for pipedream in the past for my clients was the FAR better pricing for moderate amounts of bulk operations compared to Make or Zapier.
Make or Zapier pricing is prohibitive for bulk-processing data each day, for example.
With this change, going with pipedream over Zapier/Make is no longer a no-brainer from a pricing / ability to run bulk operations perspective.
Is the credit limit likely to change again?
I’d love to see at least a bit of an increase on how many are included so it’s stlil a no-brainer when I’m selling it to clients compared to Zapier/Make
Appreciate the feedback.
We will have a formal announcement about the pricing near term.
Looping/Branching is next up on our roadmap so being able to solve for that within a workflow is on the near(er) term horizon.
We are not planning to increase the credits included on the tiers.
Our product’s value is tied to making it easier for technical teams to build serverless workflows. The depth of code support, built-in services, etc.
We are not aiming to be a low cost alternative to tools in the no-code automation space.
That’s good to know about looping/branching coming. If we can loop or branch within one workflow and not chew through as many credits, that will be a game-changer.
The value I find in pipedream is a mid-way point between totally no-code automation builders like zapier/make, and full code like a Netlify function.
I use pipedream instead of Make/Zapier on many projects because I can define some tailored components in code for my technical (but non-coding) clients to use
All the clients that I have taught pipedream have been reasonably comfortable in zapier/make but have found the flexibility of pipedream (with me to help write new components) WAY better.
So I’d suggest that some of pipedream’s value is that it is an alternative to Zapier/Make. Sure, not necessarily needing to be low-cost in comparison, but definitely because it bridges the gap between no code and full code to allow technical but non-coding people to be involved in building automations without as many of the drawbacks of fully no-code since a developer can define exactly the components an org needs
Well put. When I first tried pipedream, one of the founders said the aim was to be like Zapier for developers, which I took to mean - also - like a more flexible version of Zapier for people with some development nous.
But now there’s an explicit statement that PD is for “technical teams to build serverless workflows”. Not quite the same thing, but certainly explains the feature release pattern and pricing changes.
Would love to hear your point of view on the differences between the two statements.
Zapier for developers vs tool for building serverless workflows.
Posted thread to Discourse: When Did the Change to Charging an Extra $48/Month for 10,000 Credits Occur?
Sure thing, albeit somewhat belatedly. There is no “I” in team, right?
Except that in my team, there is indeed only I.
So I’m not trying to manage a teams or teams, building hundreds or thousands of workflows to process millions of transactions in the blink of an eye. All I’m trying to do is a few things which while not world-changing, certainly make life a little less tediously repetitive. But there does tend be more than a very few different ones, all doing different things with different mechanisms – i.e. complexity (or least intricacy), rather than volume.
So the PD features intended to support large-scale development teams (with tools, frameworks, etc) are not what I need, but rather the need to be able to experiment and bootstrap nifty ways to do things, including with “premium” apps, more than one datastore with 50 items in it.
What I see is the PD development/pricing model being correlated to high-volume, largee-scale development (as indeed you say is the aim), compared to just making small scale life a bit easier, like Zapier – albeit wearing oven mitts.
