Our journey from unlimited to a per-seat pricing model

Way back in 2020, when we decided to take our board management system to market, we faced a seemingly impossible task. We needed to get noticed in a market that was swimming with million-dollar board portal vendors, with massive budget and big customer bases.

At that stage, our system was fast becoming feature compatible with the leading board portals and our marketing strategy began to center around lower costing. Out of this, was born our unlimited user model.

This model seemed to perfectly suit our emerging focus on non-profit organizations, especially since the spirit of giving back has always been a core value of Syncrony Digital in its 25-year history.

The Limits of Unlimited User Pricing

On the face of it, offering a one-all-you-can-eat price seems to be a perfect for organizations with limited budgets. However, as time passed, we began to realize that our model had a weakness.

This weakness was directly related to the number of users an organization required. Specifically, as the user numbers drop, the unified unlimited price becomes more and more (relatively) expensive.

By way of illustration, assume that the average small non-profit has a requirement for a 10-user board portal.

Our unlimited non-profit price in this case was: $1,200 per year, which translates to $120 per user per year.

Massive Savings for Small Nonprofits

On a per-user basis, each user costs 60% less.

Now, let’s try this calculation using a per user per year model, which prices a yearly-non-profit user at $48 per year. This gives a cash-strapped nonprofit a massive $72 saving per user.

Which when paid yearly for our 10-users costs $480 a year, a massive $720 saving!

Non-Profits are our Mission

When we realized this, we knew that in order to out our money where our mouth was, we needed to switch our model to a per-user basis. This would help to empower governance and openness in a whole segment of the non-profit market that up to now has been unable to afford the proper tools required.

Implementing Per-Seat Billing

As always in the world of software development, making our new vision a reality was much harder that we anticipated. But we worked hard and have now completed the necessary steps.

Finally, we are proud to be able to launch our new per-user system during June 2024.

Enterprise customer have not been forgotten. Our original unlimited user model is still available for large users (nonprofit or business), who require on-prem or own-cloud implementation.