Updating our pricing model

We are updating our pricing model to better align our pricing with the value our customers get from Customerly. We don’t make changes like this lightly, and transparency is one of our core values, so we wanted to share our thinking behind the update and outline what’s changing for you.

The essential details

What’s changing and how you will benefit from it:

How we think about value and pricing

We’re astonished by the great community we have created since Customerly was created in 2015.

Since then, 34,605 accounts have signed up, with a total of 29,984 projects worldwide.

Nothing makes us happier than hearing the success stories our customers share with us about how they use Customerly to better help their users and provide a better experience through tailored communication.

We have evolved a lot since our start-up idea back in 2015. Even if we are fully bootstrapped, we work hard daily to serve you better.  

Keeping Customerly bootstrapped means more affordable pricing for you.

We are still rejecting VC investment proposals to keep you our main investor and offer you fair pricing.

Only in the last 12 months have we released a new live chat, web app, 100x faster workflows, and many more cool benefits for you and your team.

Of course, that work is never-ending, and we thank you all for bringing us where we are. We have been nominated as Noteworthy best live chat software in 2021 and 2022 by Capterra out of 546 products.

And this could happen only thanks to you. 🙏🏻

Even though our customers have been telling us for years how much Customerly helps them better communicate with their customers, we have been struggling to evolve our pricing to reflect our product improvements.

From day one, we offered as much value as possible in our free basic plan (it’s not going anywhere, don’t worry), like an inbox with one teammate, mobile apps, chat and help center.

How has our pricing evolved

Initially, this approach allowed us to gather as much feedback as possible and iterate fast on the product without worrying about the complexities of pricing matching the value we were providing.

We always told ourselves we’d revisit our pricing model “someday”.

We did it once in 2019, but nothing has changed except for the incredible new features and improvements we brought to you.

We’ve realized that this lack of pricing evolution in how we charge for our services is an issue for our business and our customers because it prevents us from making the investments necessary to achieve our mission.

So, we started behaving like any good team would do. We started interviewing our customers, analyzed millions of data, and checked out our competition.

We had 2 epiphanies.

First Epiphany: Contact limits

The first epiphany happened every time some of our customers reached the limits of their contacts and asked to either delete some contacts or add additional allowances to their plans.

Deleting contacts only because you will pay more for a subscription is not feeling good.

Also, we have got a lot of complaints from people switching from competitors (like Intercom or Hubspot) charging by contacts.

The truth is that none of the businesses we know is doing business with 100% of their contact list.

So charging by contact count is not aligned with the value you perceive. Our pricing and the value provided are completely misaligned because of this.

We know that our best customers perceive a huge amount of value from three things:

This is when we come up with the idea to charge per interaction.

What is an interaction?

An Interaction is something that is bringing you more business (by retaining or converting more customers or helping you out with AI), such as:

We are adding AI capabilities to help your customer service and success teams to improve their performance by 10X.

You can check how many interactions (and which kind) you have used in the previous months by visiting your Project Settings -> Billing -> Interactions.

For most of our customers, the plans included interactions are more than enough to enjoy the new Customerly plans without adding more interactions.

Second Epiphany: Plan customization

The second epiphany we had is that most of our customers prefer to stick with their plan and get more allowances.

For example, with our old pricing model, you needed to upgrade from Startup to Pro when you are adding a new teammate on top of the 5 free ones you have.

Or, again, you need to upgrade to Enterprise from Startup if you suddenly want to send a newsletter to 10K contacts.

Many of you felt friction because the value was not aligned with your needs.

And just for that occasion, you didn’t want to stick with the Enterprise pricing.

We decided to let you customize the number of additional teammates and interactions for each plan.

Last but not least, we decided to let your plan expand when you need more allowances and shrink when you don’t.

So if you need full power to send a newsletter during Black Friday, you will get charged only for the extra usage that month.

The next month your plan will be back to your allowance and price.

By running different analyses on our customers, from a one-man band to 100+ employee businesses, we have discovered that they were perfectly aligned with the new pricing structure and fit their current perceived value.

What’s changing in our pricing model?

These changes come into effect for new accounts created from May 18, 2023, and for existing accounts from June 18, 2023. Customerly customers can then pick the right plan (Basic, Essential, Startup, Pro, or Enterprise) to match their usage of each Customerly product.

What have we introduced since the last pricing update?

We always listen to our customers and develop what people ask through our public roadmap. Since our last pricing update, the number of new things we released has been incredible. Here you can find a complete list.

Live Chat

A brand new up to 100% faster chat with:

If you haven’t upgraded your live chat, we suggest you switch to our new live chat by following this tutorial.

Web App

A brand new, faster, and simpler web app with:

Help Center

The help center has been recently updated to provide faster results and experience.

You now have the fastest help center platform on the market.

The new help center is also ready to accommodate multi-language articles, which will be released in the following days.

Additional improvements

Not all the improvements we made could be seen.

In fact, we have been delivering infrastructure updates to keep up with the demand for speed for marketing automation and email sending.

The Workflows are now faster than ever, calculating every step in seconds instead of up to 5 minutes.

The Email sending infrastructure has been improved with 10 additional machines to send huge email marketing campaigns 10X faster.

We have released Zapier integration, Live chat callbacks, and Elementor form addon on WordPress.

The products you use daily are now performing better and faster thanks to a complete tech redesign using the latest technologies.

This will help us also deliver faster updates and new features for you.

The documentation of all our services has been revised completely from Victoria with new step-by-step tutorials to make it easier to understand the platform.

We are now releasing at least 5 valuable articles per month on our blog to help you deliver the best customer service, improve your marketing automation activities and make your customer satisfied.

Next steps

As mentioned, this is never-ending work, and we are prepared to improve even further.

We hear you and are prepared for another round of incredible features rollout.

You can always find what we focus on next on our public roadmap.

The three main areas of focus this year will be:

Plus, we’ll put more effort into creating tutorials and video courses with the best practices to adopt in your business.

Conclusions

We believe you are now more in control of your spending for all your customer service and marketing activities than ever before.

We wanted to bring you more flexibility and alignment with what you actually use.

We believe you have the most competitive pricing options on the market.

Some of our customers were begging us to release this pricing because it is more convenient for them and aligned with their values.

As usual, we are thankful for all your support to make us improve every day. Each of you made our offering stronger and more complete every day.

And I wanted to thank our team for our incredible progress over the last few years. It’s what makes me proud of this whole journey.

We hope you will like the new pricing updates. Please contact us via chat if you have any questions regarding your plan.

Go ahead and choose from one of the new plans and customize it based on the estimated interactions or past usage.