It was never about the hundred dollars

The Discord filled up within the hour and stayed full for two days. I've spent most of that time reading it, and I recorded an episode with Shawna O'Neal about it on Tuesday. What follows is my attempt to write down what the argument is actually about, because it isn't the hundred dollars.

The increase itself isn't the argument

That needs saying first, because it got lost. Pixel & Tonic hasn't raised prices in ten years. Andrew Welch made the point that adjusted for inflation, the new price is roughly what Craft cost at launch. Several people arrived at the same conclusion from different directions: a hundred dollars is about an hour of billable work, everything else has gone up, and a company that holds prices for a decade eventually has to move.

Nobody in that thread wants Pixel & Tonic to run at a loss. Several people said, in so many words, that they'd rather pay more than watch what happened to ExpressionEngine happen here.

The objections are about two other things.

Thirty days 

A month's notice lands badly if you have quotes outstanding. A Canadian developer put it plainly: a quote already sent is a quote you honour, and a 33% increase inside that window comes out of your margin, not your client's. He also ran the conversion nobody in the US part of the thread had run. $299 is CAD 404. $399 is CAD 539.

Announcing a quarter ahead would have helped. Welch offered the likely argument against it, which is that a longer runway invites people to buy licenses ahead of the change.

The gap

This is where the discussion actually is, and it took the thread the better part of two days to say it clearly. Shawna O'Neal, who posts as cherrykoda, got there first: it's less about the increase than about the threshold for selling Craft to someone new.

The argument runs like this. A prospective client opens the pricing page. They see a free tier that does almost everything, and a $399 tier whose most legible difference is that more than one person can log in. That reads badly to someone who has never heard of Craft and is comparing it against something they have. Nobody minds paying for value. Additional user accounts are difficult to present as value on a comparison sheet.

And this doesn't only hit tiny clients. It hits small marketing teams, two or three logins, sometimes inside very large companies. O'Neal has a Fortune 50 client with three user accounts.

The numbers people brought showed how differently this reads depending on where you work. A European freelancer described charging €60 per hour on projects ranging from €2,500 to €4,000. Another walked through a €4,000 budget: minus the license, minus two basic plugins, roughly €3,300 left to build with. I brought what I had: that small projects in Europe commonly start around €2,500, and that the Craft survey puts 20% of respondents at project budgets up to $5,000.

Some of the replies to that came from a visibly different market. That a hundred dollars is one billable hour. That a client who can't absorb it can't afford a Craft build anyway. That everyone else raised prices and nobody complained.

One exchange captured the disagreement better than any argument in it. A developer argued firmly that Pixel & Tonic is not a charity and that anyone unwilling to pay should use something else, then mentioned running several client sites on free Solo licenses. Someone else pointed out the irony: he could have put most of his clients on Solo, and had been buying Pro licenses anyway.

Craft had this once

About four hours into the thread, Brandon Kelly replied to someone asking for a smaller edition. Craft 2 had one. It was called Client: Solo plus one additional user account. It was removed at the 3.0 launch because sales didn't justify the added pricing complexity.

So the middle-tier people are asking for what has existed and was discontinued for lack of demand. What's changed isn't the idea. It's that the distance the tier would bridge just got a hundred dollars wider, and that a lot of the developers asking now weren't working in Craft in 2017.

February 27, 1:02 p.m.

Kelly posted a longer response. He thanked people for the feedback, said the community has always been the best part of Craft, and acknowledged that a price increase feels like salt in the wound when times are tough. Pixel & Tonic is a small business facing the same rising costs. They held off as long as they could and tried to soften it with a month's warning, the Solo improvement, and update trials. Then: "Not ready to make any specific announcements, but we have some ideas."

Shawna and I recorded that afternoon. She read that line out on air. Neither of us knew what the ideas were, and we still don't.

What a middle tier would need

If that's the direction, the thread has already specified it fairly precisely, and the specification is narrower than "cheaper."

O'Neal described a Lite tier: a handful of users, no GraphQL, no multi-site. Not because those aren't valuable, but because including them is what makes a tier expensive, and the clients in question don't need them. Max Strebel asked for something with fewer than five users. Others suggested Solo with per-user add-ons, or a €99 tier outright.

Multi-language is the complication. Michael Thomas made the point that in a trilingual country, small clients need multiple languages, sometimes as a legal requirement, and would take multi-language over GraphQL any day. Whatever gets stripped out, that probably can't be it.

And a middle tier wouldn't address the renewal, which I think is being underrated. Renewals go from $59 to $99. That's a 68% increase, while the thread has spent two days arguing about 33%. The entry price is paid once. The renewal is the number that appears in a comparison column every year, and in a request for proposal, that column is often read by someone who will never log in to the CMS.

They don't come back

Max Strebel put it most directly, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since: newcomers start with small projects. That's where you learn, where you build a portfolio, and where you choose the platform you'll be using in ten years. Nobody wins a €30,000 project first.

If the entry point keeps rising, people make that choice somewhere else. Kirby is €99 with three years of updates. Statamic just went to $279. WordPress is free, and everyone's client has heard of it. And developers who start elsewhere don't generally come back when their projects get bigger; they bring what they know.

Which is what makes the tone of this discussion worth noting. Nobody is asking for a discount. They're asking to keep selling it.