Please read: changes to our recent pricing update

Features Updates
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Recently, we rolled out changes to Netlify plans (also see main thread here) to better align features and performance of the platform to the different web projects you’re running.

However, based on customer feedback, last week we paused one of these changes—the update to deploy permissions workflow—in an effort to improve the workflow around this change. We’re rolling out a new experience for this change at the end of this month, on May 31st, 2022.

Learn more about how we’re rolling things out here .

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We are sorry but this seems like a bad joke.

After two weeks you reply with an article in your blog that confirms everything we already knew.

1. A new “Git Contributor” role: – If the amount to pay for a Git Contributor is the same as a team member… what has changed? what is the improvement? If the Git Contributor doesn’t have access to Netlify UI… why should we pay the same as a team member?.. We don’t want to pay for Git Contributors we want to pay for services and for the value you can provide.

2. Auto-approving Git Contributors: – This certainly makes the job of managing Git Contributors easier. But honestly it sounds like “let’s put the collection machine on automatic”. If we understood it, if we have automatic approvals enabled, someone who does a single commit on some of our sites in a month… just one commit… pays as the most active member of my team. Does this really make sense?

3. Accounts on Pro or Business plans with 7 or more members: – What has changed here? We think nothing. If a Git Contributor counts as a member. The problem is the same. You are telling the same story. You have not improved anything. We have already talked to your Agency Team and the only thing they offer us is to open one account per customer. This means paying several times for the same team member. And if we exceed the limit of 7 members we will pay a couple of thousand dollars per month. For a humble agency like ours this is not viable.

4. The improved experiences for these changes will go live at the end of this month, May 31st, 2022. – You gave us 90 days to adapt to these changes. Does this new date affect us?

Is this the best answer you can offer after 2 weeks?
Is this your way of listening to your customer community?

I am sorry but we are not going to waste any more time on this topic.

Unfortunately, your new pricing plans do not fit our needs and we will start looking for other alternatives with other providers.

Thanks

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Safe to say I feel exactly the same.

This doesn’t solve any of the issues I’ve raised, and so disappointed with this response and lack of changes.

As a small agency these changes are going to hit us hard. Is there anyone I can speak to to discuss any options here?

Otherwise it’s unfortunate but will have to consider other options. So disappointed.

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If I am understanding this correctly, this means it is $99 for each user in Github who might trigger a build? Is that right? If so, I will begin making plans to leave the service then I’m afraid. Shame. Your products are good.

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Hey folks, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on this process. We are committed to answering your questions as these changes take effect.

@paulmsmith, as a customer on our Business Plan, this means that Git Contributors, Owners, and Collaborators will cost $99 per person. For anyone on a Pro Plan, this will be $19 per person, as the amount corresponds to plan level. Netlify will automatically remove any Git Contributors that are not active within a billing cycle so that you are only charged for active Git Contributors in any given month.

@ryangittings, thank you for expressing your concerns. You can reach out to our agencies team directly at partnerteam@netlify.com.

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Thanks for the reply @hillary Is that only if the Github repository is private?

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that is correct. These changes only affect private git repositories. (The git provider does not matter, could be github, bitbucket, azure, gitlab)

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Thanks @perry @hillary

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More of the same

Let me just start by saying… sigh

A lot of time was expended by members of the community to provide open, honest & detailed feedback.

After weeks of thinking time the Netlify response is tantamount to word games, another press release that goes to great lengths to try and re-frame the change with more corporate positivity and doublespeak.

Improvements

The addition of the “Git Contributor” role is a decent change, since the previous requirement to provide every contributor with “admin level access” was blatantly absurd. However the fact that the “Git Contributors” are still priced the same as an admin account is a clear indicator that Netlify haven’t reconsidered the model in any way, and have deeply banked on charging for every single git contributor.

Partners Team & Best Practice

Speaking to the partners team has revealed itself to be as much a waste of my time as it was theirs, so many words expended but none heard, ultimately just “ships passing in the night”. It’s so irritating when you’re repeatedly told “we’re listening”, but every outward indication is of precisely the opposite.

As per what @existo has said above, the only thing that the partner team actually seemed interested in was trying to convince us that “setting up each client in their own Netlify account was best practice”.

It’s obviously “great practice for Netlify” since it increases revenue, but I simply don’t see any benefit to the agency at all, nor any benefit to the clients that would be lumped with the significantly increased cost for what they would see as the same service.

One agency account

One account / 4 x Netlify accounts
$19 * 4 = $76 per month || $99 * 4 = $396 per month
This leaves the agency room to charge a modest fee for hosting across the 10 clients.
This meets costing expectations as it is in alignment with the kinds of “wordpress hosting” that most small businesses (at least here) still rely on.

One account per client (10 x accounts)

10 accounts / 5 x Netlify accounts (4 x developers + client) per account
$19 * 5 * 10 = $950 per month || $99 * 5 * 10 = $4,950 per month
This causes each individual developer to be charged for many times over.
Every agency client ends up paying for the size of the agency they are dealing with, not the size of their own project.
Netlify have a direct line to the clients wallet, and in future can freely increase costs with lower comprehension & resistance.
It costs significantly more compared to standard hosting options businesses use here.
Agencies now have to juggle more accounts and credentials.
Increased costs extracted from clients generate client friction and reduce the money they have to spend on agency services.

Forum Moderation

If you’re going to lock every previous discussion regarding this topic the least you could do would be to provide answers to all the direct concerns raised in them.

I understand the stated aim of trying to “centralize the discussion”, however it was also your moderation that previously generated the majority of those separate threads by splitting them from the previous main thread.

The constant splitting/merging obfuscates conversation and buries legitimate feedback/questions without adequate response.

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So Netlify told us they would revisit this horrible change and then spent weeks polishing the same sh*t to make it shinier.

Nothing has changed, we are still paying per developer, and this Git Contributor role, what a joke. 19 bucks for a developer that will push just a couple PRs over a month. And if you have more than 7, BANG, you’re business and each developer will cost $99.

And the cherry on top: this will go live on May 31st. For me the message is really clear, either pay what we want or f*-off and go somewhere else. Either way, you have 2 weeks to sort this out.

And contacting agencies team is pure BS, I’ve been filling forms and sending emails since the first changes went live. So far no response. Sent another email today.

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Hey andre,

as we haven’t gone live with these change yet, we still have a change to discuss your situation as an agency with you!

We definitely had some issues with comms for agencies, but i do see that we made some attempts to contact you previously. I do get it that where teams are concerned sometimes not everyone has all the same information at the same time, could you reach out to partnerteam@netlify.com one more time from your main email address with some information about your agency?

As far as the other concerns raised by you and others - as you’re outlining, we understand the need to evaluate your use case and make the decision that you need to that is best for your business.

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It’s $19 “for a developer” only if you’re on a Pro plan.
If you were on a Business plan it’d be $99 per developer.
Once you hit 7 accounts total you’re forced to an Enterprise plan “for your own good”.

Netlify can correct me if I’m wrong, (and boy would I like to be wrong), but I believe that I spoke to the head of the partners team.

He wasn’t able to action anything of value for us, with the only offer being to delay the change on our account a fraction longer. Since you mentioned the short time frame it’s possible @perry is referring you to them, to take advantage of that.

Just don’t let the secretive way they’re dealing with agencies and the overall lack of clarity fool you into believing speaking with the partners team could reveal “special pricing or plans for agencies”, because it did not.

  • There’s only the one set of pricing, agencies will be on this pricing
  • Agencies are advised to create per-client accounts
  • Clients will pay per-developer on their own individual accounts

:grimacing:

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Thanks for the heads up. I finally got answered by email and they want to schedule a meeting. Everything is so shady with this agencies thing, nothing clear on their website, no clear answer by email or here.

For me it seems Netlify doesn’t have the courage to just say straight away that this is their new pricing model and nothing will change, pay or leave. It feels they are trying to buy more time until it’s too late for you to move out when the first bill arrives.

How are you dealing with this situation @nathanmartin? Are you moving to another service? Which one?

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It’s certainly not ideal and I think they should just be able to publish clear and concise public details.

However I don’t think it’s “shady” so much as it is just an enterprise sales funnel with another name.
Having a conversation with you “face to face” allows them to disarm you and build rapport.
As a developer it’s the kind of thing that I avoid like the plague.

I agree, although @perry’s last comment may be as close as we’ll get.

A large portion of the problem has been overly corporate communication.
They have a customer base of developers, but they keep releasing details only as extremely manicured press-releases for “c-suite executives” and people that enjoy the word “stakeholder”.

They’ve unfortunately gotten large enough to lose the human touch, seemingly no matter how many “developer advocates” and “developer flavored marketers” they hire.

We’re in the process of leaving.

The financial increase in our case is minimal, but they’ve lost our trust, and every new communication seems to compound it. I’d love a miraculous turnaround, but I’m not holding my breath.

We were originally going to migrate to Cloudflare Pages, since they’ve been kicking a lot of goals recently, their plans are cheaper (with no per-seat pricing) & they offer more resources. They haven’t quite reached feature parity with Netlify yet, but they’re getting closer with every update. Unfortunately you can’t host from the apex unless using Cloudflare’s DNS, which is a non-starter for some of our clients.

At this stage since we don’t want to fragment our hosting between providers, we’re looking to abandon the dream of an “all in one system” and step back to “being developers” and doing more of the wiring ourselves, handling the CI via GitHub and then deploying to Firebase hosting.

It will probably end up costing us more than Netlify, but we’ll have more control and be on “resource based pricing” that feels fair.

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@andre-carbonaut Did you end up chatting with the Partners Team?

@existo Did you decide on another provider?

Not long left until May 31st for everyone impacted.

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We are testing Cloudflare pages. Cloudflare workers have infinite potential.

The only problem is that it requires migrating the domain to their DNS servers. And not all of our clients want this. But, in one year, Cloudflare will be a serious competitor to Netlify. In price and services.

Another option we are testing is setting up our own infrastructure based on https://coolify.io and Cloudflare as CDN.

To day, our biggest problem is that we have been adapting our workflow to Netlify for 2 years and now we need a lot of time to jump to another provider. We are tied by Netlify.

For now we have no choice. We’ll downgrade to the Pro plan, set up the team and git committers, and pay. Curiously, we will pay less than what we are paying now… it is all very absurd.

The worst thing is the loss of trust in Netlify.

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I still can’t understand this. I received no email, no notification. I randomly found out about it, when I looked at their pricing page today and something felt off. Netlify was a huge hype for me. A synonym for “Jamstack”, “static site hosting” and “modern web”. And now this.

Vendor lock-in consequences. The more Netlify features someone used the harder it will be to exit. Almost feels like blackmailing. I wanted to use Netlify as a side hustle for small websites, but I guess I’ll drop the side hustle all together or use another service. Do you have any suggestions? Maybe Vercel?

Man oh man… what a day for this community.

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That’s by design, it was a term created by Netlify for their marketing.

If you were looking elsewhere purely to avoid forced per-seat pricing, then Vercel isn’t an option.
They have a very similar per-seat pricing model.

As with anything it ultimately depends on your requirements.

You could stick with Netlify (as it won’t impact you) if…

  • You are a solo dev/solo contributor (and always will be)
  • Your project is open source, with a public repo
  • Your usage can stay within the features/resources of a free plan

There’s no other platform currently that has complete feature parity with Netlify, but as you mention the more platform specific features you lean on the more susceptible you become to lock-in and exploitation.

They were already mentioned above, but options that I’m aware don’t currently have per-seat pricing are Cloudflare Pages and Firebase Hosting.

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Hey, hoping someone can help me here. Please could someone explain how this will affect build hooks?

We use build hooks on our headless CMS to rebuild our static sites. Will our customers still be able to do this? Or will these builds need approving too?

Approving each of these deploys is just not an option, as we have no way of knowing when our clients update their sites and how often, and we cannot have them waiting on us to deploy.

How can we make it so these builds don’t require approving?

Thanks

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Hi @andyatflocc ,

I believe that since Build hooks build the HEAD of the repo, rather than being triggered directly by a git operation (such as a commit or merge), we won’t correlate that to a git user. I am checking in with the team to be sure. Could you tell me a deploy ID for a deploy that was triggered in this manner (it will be the hexadecimal last component in the path for the URL of the build logs in our UI), so I can make sure that what you describe is what I am thinking of?

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