Hey, I know youâve recently rethought the pricing model and youâve probably taken sensible decisions, but I would like to discuss the price point for Core.
Iâm in the position to recommend Dato as an alternative to Wix, Squarespace for personal usage. These guys start at 8.50âŹ/month for Wix and $12/month (~11âŹ) for SquareSpace. I know itâs hard to compare with them since Dato doesnât serve the same purpose, but Iâm wondering if you had some insights. Prismic offers a plan at $7/month for that reason I think.
I also want to say that Dato free tier is already awesome and offers a hell lot, so thank you for this. But just a locale extra brings me to the Core plan, and thatâs tough for some individuals (or at least itâs harder to sell vs all-in-one competitors).
Again thanks for your hard work and for making Dato awesome.
Yea I would also like to see more flexible pricing for features/limitations in general. The current packages are too rigid and the jump in pricing for a specific feature can be a deal breaker.
My recent issue was for video support, to increase the monthly spend by ÂŁ64 for just video support meant I had to implement this from another provider.
You could still have the tiers for things like SLA, revision histories, etc⌠but allow more common, project specific features, to be bolted on, a bit like Netlify? Either this or an increase in tiers to hopefully meet a larger groups of clients?
Same question (observation?) here. I was just about to pull the trigger and set up a few projects and Bam! the price model was torn down and whatâs been put in its place is a tough cookie to swallow. If this sticks, when combined with the free tier changes it certainly pushes them out of the Hobbyist/Small Project space.
Hey I just had a conversation on the Slack channel and yes, they want to focus on bigger businesses as individual projects are harder to support and scale. The good news is that the developer plan has now all features unlocked but its limitations make it really hard to use on a real project, as small as it might be.
I think this is a dangerous move from the Dato team: devs are often part time freelances and love to test stuff beforehand on smaller but actual projects. This is how you create word of mouth, loyalty and advocacy.
As much as I think itâs a great CMS and a great team I will now look elsewhere for my future personal needs.
@david.bismut@Andrew@fabio@Tobbi we are trying this change for a while and see how it goes. So we are hearing all the feedback and decide what to do.
Meanwhile, if you had plans to use the Core plan and you were already Dato users before the change we are happy to allow you to use the former Core plan. Please be in touch at support@datocms.com providing some info on what you need that is not available on the free plan and what are your plans in the future.
We have plans for agencies that have even better prices than the former Core plan and also we are trying to find a good balance for a free plan that can allow small project to live on. Of course we agree that people need to try everything first before jumping to a Pro plan. But we had too many issues with the Core plan, in terms of feature missing, complaints with the extra-quotas or extra-support that we cannot provide at that little profit margin. So we are collecting all the feedback to better tweak the free plan and then weâll see how things go!
Want to echo the same feelings as above about more flexible pricing options. Having a âhobbyâ tier at 20/month with good limits was an easy sell for just about any project. Its nice that you upped the free tier but honestly I donât see the need for free to be anything but a good intro into hobby for when i want to take my project to production.
The price jump is now pretty crazy and reminds me of Contentful which is practically useless for most projects. We are an agency and a lot of the projects we would do would fit nicely in the 20-70/month range of prices depending on the limitations.
One huge sticking point with the new pricing is the record limits. From this post in 2018 (https://www.datocms.com/blog/new-pricing) I remember agreeing 100% with the post about not imposing record limits because its very hard to anticipate, but now they are back. This is a huge turnoff and makes little sense to me, especially when you yourself even said it makes no sense in the last pricing change post.
If anything Iâd like to see more pricing options, removal of record limits (or if not removal at least bumped quite a bit as 200 is nothing and so is 100,000 for the pro plan).
Dato has been a great CMS to work with and as an agency with lots of different sized clients more plans are better. Also I donât want to have to contact you directly to get special pricing it should just be available when creating a new site.
I am interested in the agency plans and will contact support to get more information, but the pricing on the main site is not encouraging for us moving forward.
Thank you @jesse for your feedback. We are happily activating the former Core plan to existing users to allow everyone to use it if they really need it.
We just want to have more information on what are the limits of the free plan that donât allow usage in your specific case.
We are considering all the feedback in order to tweak the pricing and provide the best service that we can.
The new pricing is problematic when trying to sell clients on a JAMStack approach that are already hesitant because it isnât the WordPress they know and love. Many of these clients have been paying for WordPress hosting at $10-30/mo (even specialized WordPress managed hosting is available for small sites at the upper end of that range). With JAMStack they need to pay for a static site host plus a cloud CMS. A common scenario is Netlify on the free plan but with the Level 1 forms for $19/mo, plus something like DatoCMS at âŹ19/mo in the past. This would be more expensive than their old site hosting, but not so far off that itâs impossible. If the CMS now costs âŹ199/mo, though, itâs a dealbreaker. (And there are a lot of sites that wonât fit in the new Dato free plan even though theyâd fit a budget WordPress hosting plan.) This pricing evaluation is based on monthly payments because in many cases the cash flow or purchasing authority isnât there to be able to pay on an annual basis.
I just want to add my voice to the chorus here that I find the loss of Core to be a real shame.
Having just finished my first project on Dato, I have been really happy with the quality of the CMS and was literally a day away from purchasing a Core subscription for the project to move to production. However, the Professional pricing model is going to be a nonstarter for most of my clients, echoing what @dev1 said in regards to other services that I already have to charge for.
The Free Tier is actually really fantastic with Dato, but without the ability to add a collaborator, itâs basically impossible to give my clients access to the CMS (I use my gmail account to log in).
If there is no small-site pricing plan like Core available, I unfortunately will not be able to move to Professional but instead will have to move to a lesser CMS like Prismic.
@mat_jack1 1200 per year for facilitating a CRUD is a hard sell. DatoCMS has all the right ingredients but this price jump is golden shackles. Just a shame to see the direction the system has been heading. In its primitive stages DatoCMS was this clean white label solution that replaced Wordpress and facilitated a fair and great solution for engineers and developers seeking a headless. Itâs surprising that as European company that you guys would enforce such pricing for multilingual features.
Chipping away at the selling aspects. Iâd accept this if the system was technically superior but itâs just not there yet. This thread sends a clear message and how you guys act moving forward will be a decider for me and Iâd assume others.
Edit:
Additionally, we shouldnât have to change your minds. Youâve got a fair amount of engagement in this thread alone in comparison to other threads and in combination with the limited engagement from customers this forum receives it should be a clear revert.
Thank you @nicos for the honest feedback. All the existing users that are getting in touch at support@datocms.com are getting the Core plan back, so feel free to get in touch if you still want that one and youâll be able to use it also on new projects.
Then regarding the future we might change our mind and roll back, but we want to collect some data on how things go for a bit. I think that for at least a couple of months we wonât do any significant changes anymore. Weâve already raised the limits on the Developer plan by adding more models after many feedbacks, but for the rest we want to try and stick to this for a bit. Otherwise we cannot really tell if the change is for the better or the worse.
But we donât want to affect any existing customer, that might have had other plans. Let me know instead if you have any other question or doubt.
One of the main issues with the new Free plan is the 200 record limit. That is sooo easy to hit. The old one was perfect with 1000 records. If Iâm using my site as a blog, which I am, Iâm going to hit this wall in no time. Itâs really a shame.
I just wish you had some sort of mid-tier optional available with a more reasonable price around $20/mo. $200 is just such an astronomical jump in price that Iâll probably have to switch altogether.
And I also think 10GB/mo of bandwidth is quite small as well. If this + the records were increased, itâd be a lot easier to swallow these changes.
hey @Xenostar we are happy to readd the former Core plan to existing users, please get in touch at support@datocms.com for that and Iâll add that back to you!