User Subscription Model Change - Implications on your business?

Jack24

We're one of the companies that took advantage of smartsheet's free internal editors, meaning staff with a company email address making changes to reports. Now that user type is changing to a paid seat, we'll go from 2 seats to up to 100. That's a big $$ change.

Smartsheet has been great, but this pricing change destroys the core value proposition that smartsheet had. No other alternative had this model.

Will others here:

1. Accept the (possibly minor to you) price change
2. Modify your use of the product to minimize the price change
3. Look at alternative that are now on a level per-seat price model
4. Other?

Brian_Richardson

We're waiting to see what the impact will be to our costs. The account reps are doing what they can with pricing to mitigate the increase. It's not a straight conversion… meaning if you're paying $200 each today for a license for 2 people, you won't be paying $200 each tomorrow for the licenses for 100 people on the new model. Whether they make those licenses $20…unclear.

Also you don't need to convert right now if you're already a paying account. New accounts are on the new system, but existing accounts don't have to convert until the new year or longer. Your account rep should be talking to you about the impact.

To answer your other questions, for us at Iron Mountain, we have 5500 users, Advanced package addons, and many many solutions on Smartsheet. So pulling out entirely really isn't an option for us without incurring a lot of conversion pain. What's more likely is that we'll get more stringent and "auditing" on who gets to edit data and who just really needs to look at it, to keep our costs under control.

Although the pricing change is a little scary, Smartsheet frankly brings so much value, that we'll work it out.

My primary worry is that it's going to chill adoption. Although the model change is being made to improve adoption by opening the tool capabilities to a wider audience, the reality is that the company will make moves to control costs and therefore probably remove future paid access from people who have it today for free.