Upcoming changes to Netlify plans

@perry our account is account-zdbty-s’s team

This change is absolute insanity. I will never never recommend Netlify to another client. You guys broke our CMS pipeline literally the day we went to set up another Netlify account. Absolutely insane. The number of contributors to our repo should have zero interest to Netlify. You run a service that builds a website and hosts it. We pay for the build minutes. Why does Netlify care if we have random developers in our organization contribute code? It’s not like it’s building constantly. $20 per developer? Nope. Nope nope nope nope.

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You know what’s really stupid about this change too?

The requirement for GitHub accounts to match Netlify team members is only an issue when pushing to Git repos under the Git account in question, and then having the connected repo trigger an auto-deploy… you know, the very definition of “continuous deployment”.

However, I can still push my code to Git, cancel the “Pending Review” build, and then trigger a new deploy from the Netlify panel, OR a web hook URL. Netlify will still pull the latest code and build my site with the latest changes! Which is a good workaround for me today until this is surely unwound.

So all you’ve effectively done Netlify is destroyed surely thousands of Continuous Deployment setups for code changes, while leaving the door open to achieving the same result by manually kicking off deploys or using hooks? (granted you couldn’t break that, because that’s what Netlify freaking DOES!).

Who on Earth approved this change?

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That’s how we see it too, it’s a tool with an audience of technical customers and there are so many viable workarounds for the restriction that it’s laughable, but we’ll pay their tax, do our immediate deploys and then abandon ship. If we have to come back later with our tail between our legs then so be it, but it seems like the only way we’re guaranteed to “lose” is by staying.

The reality is nobody should have been surprised by this today, in fact nobody should have even had to think about it at all.

Trying to look at it from Netlify’s perspective I can see how at some point they took a look at the number of contributors on repos and the number of accounts and went “our customers are ripping us off!”, but I see a pretty big distinction between “needing to edit the code of a site” and “needing to access the administrative account of the hosting provider” and I’m not sure how they ended up at this solution.

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Thank you! I finally got a build done today thanks to this!

Reflecting it as a “small change” is disingenuous. For many customers, this will amount to $100s more per month. That’s not small. There was no empathy for the customer at all. This was purely done to increase MRR and there is zero benefit to the customer. Trying to sneak it through by saying it’s a “small change” in some blog post is really inconsiderate of customers. You added huge stress by basically throwing up a complicated paywall to a product we’re already paying for! And which is designed to ease deployments!

In fact, even without the price increase, this has just totally complexified everything so much more. How can we remove Github emails, these emails don’t match up, going to the Pricing page clarifies nothing (can’t even see details for our current plan), and we’re forced to manually deploy. The whole automation piece is just completely broken and complex now. Now we have to train all developers on Netlify, I guess. Why should we have to do that? Why do our developers now have to sign in to yet another service, add another security risk to our stack with a Netlify account… just terrible all around.

In this thread we’re invited to post our account details. Which I did, much to my chagrin, and honestly this feels like a security risk in and of itself! Why should we have to post our account details in a public forum? And for what? Reading between the lines it sounds like there will be some analysis to see if we were previously emailed, and if not, you will send us an email explanation? Great. Just great.

One would expect that Netlify rolls this back tomorrow. This feels like when Patreon adjusted their billing. It was a catastrophic business decision. This is too.

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I’m sure you already know this, but there are so many counter-arguments to that. Software development doesn’t just always conform to one set workflow - companies pull in contractors all the time, and to require that they need a Netlify account for CD is just crazy.

Thinking about this in more detail, I had the thought that, sure, if your company has a workflow where all of your code is merged to main/master via pull requests, then you could reduce the number of Netlify accounts to only those that have the power to deploy.

BUT, Netlify enables all sorts of much smaller and agile scenarios, like building static websites via things like Gatsby (our use case), Next.js, and many others. In these cases, there might be a single trusted developer working on those, who just pushes directly to the repo to speed things up - these scenarios are now hobbled by this change.

This was clearly not the way forward to earn more revenue, and I cannot believe that no-one at Netlify pushed back on this change. There must be some very smart minds working at Netlify who saw this catastrophe coming a mile away.

This needs to be unwound with an apology, and a promise to do better methinks.

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No problem, glad it helped! It’s wasted enough of my time today too :slight_smile:

That’s why I can’t see how they ended up at this solution, as you can immediately think of all kinds of situations that become needlessly complex , expensive or downright broken by it. Did nobody at Netlify provide those counter-arguments?

It made it all the way through planning, implementation, (possibly testing?), and release!

Wake up to an email notifying me the build requires my approval. Breaking the CI/CD is not a small change and should have been communicated clearly.

We are only using Netlify to build and deploy our frontend - no other features. And the only reason I have a team plan is to get a higher build limits.

This is absurd as none of the developers need access to the Netlify dashboard.

We are either downgrading to Starter plan or move off the platform.

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I know right. :slight_smile: I actually hope the real scenario is a bunch of people at Netlify currently saying “we told you so” to some other people at Netlify.

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RE: the changes that took place today:

  1. This really needs to be re-thought out. If you want people to pay more money maybe just charge by unique committer per month, but don’t make everyone create accounts. It’s bad UX, is bad DX, it’s a waste of everyone’s time and your account creation / github linking is convoluted and bad since we are trying to make separate work accounts for people.

  2. Seriously, 7 team members is enterprise? Give me a break!

We are using netlify for static site hosting (just our frontends), and that’s about it. The alternatives here are something like another heavy service such as Vercel or something simple and almost free like AWS S3 + Cloudfront. Why should I not just switch to using simple AWS services? Explain to me why I need to pay nearly a thousand dollars a month for my small team and deal with all these headaches when all I’m doing is hosting static sites? Yeah the CI / CD stuff is nice but I can move it all into github actions at a reasonable cost.

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Update: I just got my app running on CloudFlare Pages in about half an hour. They’re offering way more resources with unlimited seats for $200/month, and about the same resources with unlimited seats for $20/month.

So long and thanks for the good times Netlify. Sorry it had to end this way.

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The main thing we’ve had our eye on is that their “Business plan” also comes with “Live chat support”, something that the equivalent $99 per seat Netlify plan does not.

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Add us to the list of furious customers. This have completely disrupted our workflow as well. Looking into other platforms.

Paying per developer for a service that literally has nothing to do with the amount of people working makes zero sense. Like so many others have said. We’re paying for buildminutes, bandwidth etc. Whoever pushes changes should not matter.

We hope you have fixing this or we’ll have to leave the platform.

Our team is “Wilson” or “teamwilson”.

This morning we discovered that we can’t do a Branch or Production Deploy from our Github accounts.

What a surprise!!!

You have completely broken our workflow without notice !!!

You call this “some small changes to our Netlify plans”?

We are living a nightmare.

We are Netlify fans. We love Netlify. We have been customers for 3 years. But this is unacceptable.

We think the same as @f3rg

We are a small team of 4 guys. We started with an old plan that included 3 seats. We never use those seats because in our small team only one person is managing the devops tasks.

In your last pricing plan update, we decided to go with 1 seat on the Business plan ($99) instead of 4 on the Pro plan ($76). We prefer to pay for more services than for users that we are not going to use.

With your new pricing plans, if we hire an external developer for a project or the client asks me to integrate with a Git based CMS we have to pay an additional $99 per Git user. This is insane. A small agency like ours, working for small clients, simply cannot afford these costs.

A Netlify user is not the same as a Git contributor.

It doesn’t make sense that every Git contributor involved in a project has to be part of my team at Netlify.

We want to pay. But for something that brings us value.

What you are proposing is simply an abuse that seriously compromises our business and creates a lot of distrust for us.

Honestly. We are going to seriously consider abandoning Netlify as a hosting platform and migrating to another provider that better suits our needs.

In the meantime… could you give us a solution so that we can continue working as we have been? We can’t publish our work and it’s Friday.

Thanks

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See above. You can still push your code to git and then manually deploy via the Netlify control panel. Netlify will still pull all the latest code in Git and build your app/site, it’s just that it can no longer auto-deploy from pushes which originate from a user who doesn’t hold a Netlify account.

You can also setup a deployment hook and give your external devs the URL to hit if they do not have access to Netlify’s control panel. Clunky, but it works.

Thanks @shapeable for your reply…

The problem is with a Branch Deploy.

We create a Branch Deploy where the client can review changes or new features.

This is essential for our workflow.

We did not find a way to publish a Branch Deploy manually from the control panel.

What you propose seems to work only for Production Deploy.

This is the solution we are evaluating. We are currently creating an automation with Integromat (make.com) to be able to launch the webhook when we create a new commit in a branch.

But… Is it really necessary to do this? We want to pay and have all the advantages we have enjoyed until now. But the terms of this new pricing plan are incompatible with our business model.

This is a lot of work as we have more than 30 sites hosted on Netlify.

We are very frustrated and saddened today.

We have felt this as a kick in the face.

Thanks

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My thoughts echo those above. This is a major breaking change that was implemented too quickly, without any notification via email.

These changes make it untenable for the majority of my clients. I am the sole dev-ops for most all the companies I work for - and don’t believe this update to the plan makes it fair or reasonable, when the account holder themselves aren’t part of the dev-ops team, they just handle billing.

Please re-consider this :frowning: I love Netlify and all you’re doing - but this is really disappointing and will make me have to look elsewhere - which I really don’t want to do!

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I agree, I think this change is a bit bonkers too :frowning:

At the very least, I think it would be a bit more fair if Netlify would allow a handful of free guest accounts or committers, especially for those using a Business-level plan. There are a lot of small business setups and workflows which aren’t compatible with charging per Git user.

It also just seems stupid that there are clearly ways to work around this, but those make Netlify suddenly feel a bit clunky. That’s a shame as it’s a service I really love, and I’m sure many others do too.

I hope this is all reconsidered.

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