Feedback on proposed Pro Pro Pricing: flamber, sameer, et all if you don't mind reading

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I just want to say thanks for Metabase and the work you guys have put into it over the years. I've deployed the package at a number of organizations I've worked for and I've greatly enjoyed using it as a tool to teach people about self-serve data analytics.

I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming .41 release, but there's a few things I think you guys should consider.

First, for self-hosted products, please consider something other than a per-user-per-month fee. The whole point of self-hosted is that you can scale on your terms. I think you'll to push [otherwise honest] people to password share resulting in lost revenue. Instead, consider charging per-core. We'd gladly pay you $1000/mo per core or more if it meant no restrictions on users. Any business has to de-couple their expenses from their scaling plans in order to succeed. The "per-user" model is becoming a hinderance to that; with $10/mo for slack, $15/mo for jamf, $15/mo for MDM, $15/mo for email, in addition to payroll taxes, health insurance, etc, and it gets very expensive monthly to hire people.

Second, I would encourage you guys to do the following. This statement is from the .41RC release notes:

For Pro and Enterprise plans, Admins can now see all subscriptions and alerts set up in their instance.

I agree, I think this is an "Enterprise" level feature. Oversight is very important in larger organizations.

Plus, Admins in these plans can now restrict the domains to which Subscriptions and Alerts can be emailed.

This is a tad concerning. By running this software, you're essentially stating data exfiltration is a real possibility, and given the previous EE-only feature, you won't be aware it's happening. This doesn't give anyone confidence their internal secrets won't be leaked. I would encourage you guys to include this very basic control in the OSS Version.

Thank you for your consideration
-Jonathan

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Hey Jonathan,

Bruno, VP Product at Metabase here.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback! Hope I have some answers for you.

On per-user pricing, I understand your point. We've explored several ways of scaling prices in search for a model that is both fair and easy to understand, and so far per-user seems to be the best balance, and an industry standard. We'll continue to evaluate this, but plan to stick with it for now.

On the domain restrictions for Subscriptions/Alerts, let me clarify what we're doing. We're not changing how those features work; all that we're doing is giving Admins in paid plans – who often have tighter compliance and security needs than our broader user base – additional power to manage the use of those features. It's not to different from Audit Logs we already offer and the Block Data Access permission we're also adding in 41; it's an extra level of control for those who need it.

Subscriptions and Alerts continue to follow the permissions you set today in the open source version: if someone has the rights to view a question/dashboard, they have the rights to create subscriptions. In other words, if you, as an admin, trust that someone can view/download results, we extend that to trust that they can create Subscriptions/Alerts for it (since they're just a "push" version of the results). If you remove access from people you don't trust, they won't be able to create Subscriptions/Alerts.

Hope it clarifies things and assuage your fears.

Cheers,

Bruno

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Bruno, thank you very much for the thoughtful reply. Thanks for the explanation on the second item. The alleviates a lot of my concerns.

I do really think if your mission is to democratize analytics, a per-user fee is not the way forward (for self-hosted... I think on your cloud offering it makes sense). We have 140+ call center agents that I'd love to have log in once a day and check their stats, but it would not be worth the $1400/monthly cost to do this, as they simply wouldn't be getting the value out of it. Getting access to our executive members is worth the per-user fee, but we've strayed from the original intent of getting data out to everyone. Please do consider something other than a per-user-per-month fee. A max simultaneous user count, max queries per minute, per-core, etc are all better models.

Thank you for your consideration and the response.
-Jonathan

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Thanks for the input, those are all very reasonable ideas. We'll continue to take them into account, and I may reach back out later on for some follow-up conversations.

Cheers!

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