Just kicked the tires on Optimizely for a site with less than a million MAU. They wanted $50K upfront for one year. No monthly or quarterly billing available. Went with Google Optimize instead, works fine for free. In the face of that, very surprised Optimizely doesn't do month to month to get folks started.
It's worse. They essentially kicked-out their existing self-serve customers in the process. We were on the (at the time) silver plan, but when we were ready to upgrade to gold, there was no gold, no silver, nothing... Just some super-expensive and vague enterprise plan.
But there's a silver lining: we created and open-sourced Alephbet[0] - a simple A/B testing platform together with a couple of backend options with AWS Lambda/redis[1] and couldn't be happier :)
Optimizely used to, but their sales strategy changed to deliberately reposition themselves in the market.
They've priced out self-service and smaller users, and repositioned their sales model for larger companies with immature internal capabilities. They lock you in with that annual pricing, and include enough margin to throw a massive amount of support resources at you to ensure you get everything fully off the ground and deeply embedded into your internal workflows.
As an early self-service user, it was really irritating when I tried to bring them into a new company I started at and realized they made that change. But after working for a major marketing agency for a while, I've realized that it makes sense for them (even if it sucks for my purposes). In the world of large scale brand marketing companies (such as CPG companies), even a rudimentary informational/branding/brochure-ware website tends to be a $500k+ abomination, involving a super complex IAT[1] consisting of 3-6 external agencies and internal teams. In that world, the single greatest cost for anything is the man-hours required for account management, since even the tiniest of thing involves so much coordination (both logistically and politically). Optimizely's absurd looking price bakes in the cost of providing that level of account management support as well as initial implementation/usage technical support. Without those, it's entirely likely that the brand could purchase Optimizely and it'll sit unused because the agency scopes don't account for it and no one is willing to eat the unscoped hours required to implement/support/use it.
I have been thinking about how Saas has been the golden product but how as some smaller Saas companies grow they no longer appear to be selling Software as a service but rather Service via software.
They used to, but they ended it a few years ago. They consciously moved higher market, higher touch, higher cost.
Ultimately, i believe they got squeezed between smaller companies using free or cheaper offerings and larger companies probably building it themselves.
Interestingly, many other companies are starting to take this path, and I think it sucks. Not that they're focusing on enterprise customers, but that they're essentially pulling a bait-and-switch: get traction and word-of-mouth with smaller self-service customers, and then once they get enough street cred, go tell those smaller customers who were crucial to their early success to fuck themselves.
Full Story has gone this route. They used to have a plan that would work for smaller companies, now they have nothing between their free tier (1000 sessions a month) and their lowest level paid tier which is "5 figures annually" (they won't even announce any pricing on their website, though not sure if they ever did).
