I've never understood Mapbox pricing. $499 lets you give maps access to 250 users. That's steep for solo devs / small shops that want to create a map-based app. And there's no way of knowing how that pricing will scale without contacting them for an enterprise plan!
Really, don't bother trying to contact them, it's not worth it. If anything their business API is less sketchy than their actual sales tactics.
We had two different conversations with them and the first time the rep quoted us a rate that worked out to $72 per 1000 map impressions. The second time we spoke to a different rep who, when asked the differences between the free plan and the business plan, told us that if we were currently on the free plan outside of the ToS there would be "consequences".
Edit: I should add that afterwards we immediately switched to MapBox. Straightforward pricing, and it feels great to know that we're supporting the open source community.
So, launching a product or service 101: speak to your potential customers first to gauge their response and limits.
This is a good change. I'm glad they listened to feedback on pricing and removed the header. Had the commercial licence lunched like this, would there still have been unhappy people? Probably, yes, people like to complain and don't like to pay, but I don't think it would have even been on the same scale. Instead, I think the majority of people would have understood that developers need to live.
The pricing change seems great - the startup plan looks good (you can pay monthly!), and the price per instance for other commercial use looks much more reasonable.
Yes, especially for businesses. $15/month is super low.
But yeah, for some people, especially developers, it can seem a little high.
I will also change the pricing for sure in the future, once I have some business specific features like API access, multiple seats etc.
Just wanted to test the waters, and I was already able to get my first 100 customers, so I know this works. Now I just have to optimize the pricing and work on things that users request.
I was also a bit worried about the price change, but people have still been signing up! The service saves a lot of development time, so I think it's very affordable when compared to a developer's salary.
I want to say our tiny startup was quoted about $30k? Then they dropped it recently to $199, and now it's free.
I'm guessing "hope Google calls asking for a new integration and charge them a million dollars" was the business model, and they're hoping to transition into a model where they charge users.
When this was first announced I remember reading about their pricing model where they would take a percentage of app revenue. I'm glad to see they offer flat pay-as-you-go pricing now. Some of the Watson services are intriguing.
Co-founder here. The basic premise is we price based on the type of environment, the number of environments and the number of services within the environment. The reason we took pricing off the site was because every company has a unique setup. When we did user research it was confusing presented as a big table with checkboxes. We decided that for now a quick chat to make sure we understand what's needed was the best way to communicate what it costs. But, the starting point is as around $1000/month if you have a modest setup. For most funded startups with a development team this is usually where they start. We're specifically targeting companies at the moment and not individual developers. We do have some plans to address that segment of the market but we've had to focus where there's an addressable opportunity for our size and scale. This is great feedback and we'll figure this out soon.
If it wasn't clear I meant 100mil requests, not $$$.
The pricing is fixed for a tier plan. This is no different than deciding which license to acquire for a service.
Do you have any insight into how large the volume of your map requests is?
(Also a Mux co-founder) For anyone interested, we just rolled out new pricing tiers that make the service more accessible, including a $50/month starter plan and free Lite plan. https://mux.com/blog/announcing-self-serve-pricing-signup/
This is compared to our prveious entry level price of $1k/month when we were focused only on developers at larger media companies.
Are there pricing options for developers that aren't in this position? The platform looks great, but $80/month on a personal subscription feels really steep.
Same here. The majority of our SaaS users are non-paying (and will never pay because of their user role). With the new plans, we would immediate go from $50/month to $400+/month. That's a lot for a bootstrapped startup and would be one of our most expenses services we pay for.
We would be happy to pay even $99 or $149 a month, but increasing the price 8-9x is a big jump, as great as the product is.
When my start up spawned 8 years ago, our initial price included a $2000 setup and a monthly user-fee. We had managed to find a fair few willing to pay, which funded development and ensured we would survive. Within 6 months we were able to drop the setup fee completely and solely rely on a monthly fee.
At the time I was morally objected to it as I did not feel justified charging that amount of money for a product still in development, but I am glad my business partner had more sense.
From the discussion here, it appears that a lot of 'picks and shovels' app tool providers seem to expect that their customer base will be well venture funded companies.
Their pricing plans seems to reflect this by have a 'free' tier that supports nothing more than a quick test MVP, then a paid plan in a VERY high price range that would be considered negligible for someone who has just secured $100M in venture cap.
Feel for we founders who want to stay bootstrapped, and who will be paying for tools out of nothing but slowly trickling in revenue from paying customers. For us, $250+ per month is a real cost, and not a flippant consideration in the early stages of our growth.
I'd much prefer to see vendors have more gradually tiered pricing plans, or else peg the cost to a meaningful metric, such as 'per paying customer' rather than 'per anonymous site visitor' etc.
Now we just need lower fees to make developers happier...or a service that can match the high fees (eg. possibility of create and manage affiliates, more payment methods, discounts, etc.)
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