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'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.
[1] https://isl.co/2018/10/agile-iat-four-principles-for-better-...