🚨 Podio's New Business Model Update
Dear Valued Podio customers,
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We are writing to inform you about important updates regarding Podio, including changes to our business model and pricing structure. We are excited to introduce a new business model that brings simplicity and efficiency to defining employees and external clients. We are moving from a variable pricing model to a fixed license model as part of this transition.
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New Business Model:
In our ongoing pursuit of simplicity and efficiency, we are introducing a new business model for Podio. This transition involves moving from a variable pricing model to a fixed license model, allowing for streamlined user management and improved collaboration within and outside your organization. This brings in changes to the below-mentioned areas.
- Email Domain Requirement
- External/Client Permission
- User Management
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Domain Requirement:
This new model eliminates the dependency on email domains for determining paid user licenses. Instead, licensing will be determined based on user capabilities. This change offers greater flexibility in collaborating with individuals, regardless of their email domain. When inviting new users to workspaces, you will now have the option to specify if they are employees or external clients. Please refer to the image below for a visual representation. It's important to note that these changes do not affect the current employee network logic, which still relies on the email domain associated with your company.
External/Client Permission:
As part of our efforts to enhance the user experience and align with the new business model, there will be some adjustments for free external client users. We are reducing the capabilities of free external client users to align with industry standards. This change allows us to focus on delivering exceptional value and features to our paid users while maintaining a high level of service for everyone. If you have any doubts regarding the new permissions of employees and externals/clients that will go live on August 30, 2023, kindly review this help center article here.
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User Management:
To provide flexibility in managing your users, the organization admin will have the ability to move employees to externals/clients seamlessly and vice versa. This enhanced user management tool will be available starting from August 1, 2023.
If you have any further doubts, kindly contact our support team here.
Packaging Updates:Â
In addition to the new business model, we have updated our packaging structure. We are transitioning from a variable/pay-as-you-go to a fixed license model. You will have a more predictable and streamlined billing experience. You only pay for the necessary licenses and use them as you see fit. You have peace of mind knowing exactly what you will pay each month. You are in control of the bill. Contract Owners can easily update the license count whenever required during the billing cycle. This change ensures fairness and consistency in pricing for all our valued customers.Â
All existing variable plan customers will be moved to fixed plan on August 1, 2023. If you need further clarification on managing your plan, kindly review this article here.Â
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Should you have general questions about user permissions, using the user management tool and workspace user permissions for employee and external client users: please contact Podio support at https://support.citrix.com/cscase/ams/podio and choose "General question" as the issue type.
If you have any billing-related questions for your account, please contact Podio support at https://support.citrix.com/cscase/ams/podio and choose "Billing" as the issue type.
We are hosting live webinar series to review the reasoning behind the changes, and overview of exactly what is changing.Â
- Webinar August 9 - 13.00 PM EST (19.00 CET) - sign up here.
- Webinar August 16 - 8 AM EST (14.00 CET) - sign up here.
Deadline update; extended deadline to August 30, 2023.
Roll-out timeline:
- We will initiate rolling out new workspace user permissions August 30 for a small part of the user group and organizations
- We will continue the roll-out for remaining users and organizations during the month of September
Thank you for your continued loyalty and support,
Podio Team
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Babsi (Barbara Kotzulla) Non profit accounts will continue to receive the discount you're already receiving.Â
Martin Chlupáč If you need these users to continue creating, they will need to be paid for seats. We will have someone reach out to you to discuss pricing to see how we can help.ÂLinda VA I'm sorry this was so confusing for you. You will continue to pay for just employee licenses, like you are already doing. However, we are changing the user roles and depending on how much you want your users to create in your Podio account, you may need to convert more External users to Employee licenses. If this doesn't make sense, please submit a support ticket and we'd be happy to help explain further https://support.citrix.com/cscase/ams#/podioÂ
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Let me get this right, if you want to remove users this does not decrease your cost moving forward? The new pricing model has not been laid out which I find incredible. I am very disappointed with this move, as it seems, our many other long-standing Podio customers. Poor communication, last minute...
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Chris Manfredini This article should help clarify user roles and how they will be updated https://help.podio.com/hc/en-us/articles/201019898-Member-roles-in-workspacesÂ
Uwe Häfner Per our terms of service, updating pricing is allowed. Is this what you are referring to? Or would you like someone to take a more detailed look at your Organization and help you understand what the new potential pricing will be for any changes you'd like to make? We would be happy to discuss in a Support ticket how we can best help you.Â
Glenn O'Grady If you could submit a support ticket https://support.citrix.com/cscase/ams#/podio I'd be happy to give you a call and help clarify this for you. We will no longer be requiring the domain for Employee licenses and instead it will be up to the owner to decide which users will have what roles. Just put your ticket to my attention and someone will send to me :)Â
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Rob Yandell The price will remain the same however we have a chart here that explains the new roles your members will have. You will need to decide how many paid seats you want. https://help.podio.com/hc/en-us/articles/201019898-Member-roles-in-workspacesÂ
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This is going to screw your developer/partner network. If making this change, then why wouldnt you keep a developer role of some kind along with it? This is a glaring oversight and tells me you definitely didnt solicit feedback from your developer network on this... not to mention only giving 15 days notice?! I have 40+ clients?! 15 DAYS?! And no consideration for those who have prepaid for a year... ? *sigh*
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There is no need for your support staff to contact us as everything is entirely clear and utterly disrupted.
We utilize Podio with external users solely to grant them permission to "Create app items," which is currently unavailable to them. We definitely cannot pay for all these external users.
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Ben Kern, we will provide partner and developer service account users to certified partners, sent you a private message with the details as communicated to our partners several months back.
Martin Chlupáč, I recommend adding a link in your workspace allowing free external clients to create items using a webform if you don't want to move them to a paid license. Item creation using webforms will continue to be free, this link can be embedded in the workspace: https://help.podio.com/hc/en-us/articles/201019628-Webforms
Alternative, we have extensions enabling clients to create and update items from client portal solutions like Procfu: https://procfu.com/
TomaĹľ, we will continue to allow for full collaboration in the workflow automation user form, this is owned by Podio and something we continue to support.Â
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Please could someone from Podio contact us urgently? We are a small charity who relies on Podio and this change could really impact us. We need to know what the price is likely to be for us now - we have 10 employees and 18 external users, all of which need to be able to create items which it looks like they may not be able to do any more. Thank you.
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Corrie Watson If all 18 externals need to create or edit an item, your organization will require 28 licenses in total.
Ananth
Team Podio -
Sara Høeg Højlund-Rasmussen - I have read the article before you had sent your message and the reason I am asking is b/c it's not clear on that article. There is an External Client (New) Column, which not sure what makes that new..... and then there is a Guest User Column. On the Guest User Column, it says Yes (Depends on the invitation). So can we have External Users as a Guest Role and they can edit app items? I don't want another article, I NEED AN ANSWER. If you want to charge more money, you need to provide BETTER customer service now like the other platforms you are comparing your price plan too
From reading all the major complaints it sounds like you can solve 99% of your problems by External User being able to update Item Fields.
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Thanks Anantha Krishnan A S. So instead of paying $134 annually we will now have to pay $392? That's a massive increase for a small charity. Do you have any special rates for charities?
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Anantha Krishnan A S - What if you only need Users to Edit Apps and not create them? What is the best method to get this done?
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Chris Manfredini External Client user is written as New because it is not live yet, and it will be from August 15; Guest users can edit an item shared with them if the person who is sharing them gives them edit permission, guest users can only access specific items shared with them.
Regarding your question about editing apps, the answer is no, only paid users can edit or create apps. -
Corrie Watson, Yes, that would be the case if all 28 want to create or edit items. Please ping me on Podio chat for further details about non-profit organizations.
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Gabor if you fid one pls let me know, this is SO unexpected and unacceptable as can be. don't feel we can ever trust Podio with our business again.
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With this kind of logic behind witch in that case does not make sense to me, it’s a two way street.
Either people are going to pay much more, stay loyal and won’t get nothing much as they are now. OR people will slowly look at alternatives.
Our customers have 20+ external users… with nothing better for their experience and to pay that much more..
Love Podio, but don’t like direction where this is going.
And this thing “our customer support will look at your case to try find a solution”… sounds like everyone should grab a 1:1 bargain and the quiet ones will be ripped on 15th.. -
Hello
I would like to understand what are the new permissions assigned to external accounts.
if I have an item and this item must be updated by an external account who normally is my client , let's say change the data of a category or add a note (not just the normal comment) I mean a note inside the item or add a price, a date, etc I understand that now the external account client will not be able to create an item, nor edit the structure of the app but the external client should be able to update any data field inside the item this is why i invive a client to check the data , then it will it be possible or not? If it cannot be done, there is no reason to have an external account client just to see the info in the item. For that reason, I just send an organized file in pdf with the info if is only to review and I don't need to have a Podio for absolutely nothing and I would have to after using it from more than one Decade sadly having to close my account
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Hi,
I deeply dislike the new updates since I collaborate with many customers and providers in Podio and paying a license for them will cost me greatly. One of the most important reasons for me to join Podio 5 years ago, was it´s collaboration capabilities, and now you are reducing them in a very important way. If that is what you choose to do with your business, I´ll have to find my way out.
Anyway, I have paid in advance my year contract . Not sure when it´s over but I expect you to respect the terms I´ve paid for at least ´till my contract is over.
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Well this is interesting.
We like to understand your new pricing as we don't see it on the web yet. We have built a business around driving people to Podio.
Our current model:
* We advertise, sell, and manage an investment management product that uses Podio as the backend storage and base user interface.
* People purchase monthly subscriptions at our website
* The customer creates a free subscription at Podio.com then clicks a link in an email we send them that uses your API to authorize us as an admin on their workspace.
* Our backend uses your API to create the podio apps, hooks, reports, etc. then adds them as a regular member on the workspace.
* Our backend is notified of actions via your webhook features and we update and manage the data in their Podio apps via the Podio API.
* They have access to your features and our customization as long as they are a subscribing member.
* Many customers desire additional features that your Plus and Premium solutions require and we inform them how to purchase those upgrades when they are ready to scale.It seems your changes will block our installation process, drive our monthly costs up as we must pay for admin rights on each of their accounts.
Further, we have many customers that have lots of contractors that go in occasionally to update fields. It looks like we have to notify them that they must start paying Podio more.
How can we get a copy of your new pricing and help understanding what this new pricing and user features mean to our business and our customer's businesses?
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I’ve been looking to get out of Podio for a long time it’s got a whole lot worse since Citrix took over.
After looking at a number of platforms the closest I have found is Airtable which seems to be far more customer focused and is a lot faster in its operation. It’s front end is not as comfortable as podio but it works and the upgrades come fairly frequently airtable
The other option I am looking at is to get away from subscription services and return to a locally hosted service. As a small business there is a bit more work involved but a greater sense of security because I control the encryption and firewall, I’m a smaller target than a big operation like Citrix. There have been a lot of improvements in locally hosted apps in recent years -
Hi Sara Høeg Højlund-Rasmussen,
Please have someone reach out to me as well. We have a number of external contractors and certified Podio working with us on Podio. I need help to understand clearly how this extremely short-notice major change will affect us. Also, I want to understand what if any features/functionality our external contractors lose. Thank you.
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Hi Podio Team,
Given the size of the change and the timeframe provided, can we organise an urgent meeting to discuss the solutions available?
We are in Sydney Australia so please bear in mind the timezone differences.
In the meantime, we request an extension on the change whilst we organise this.
Kind regards,
WT
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Stephanie Reed, Â Xaviera Ringeling, & Wealth Adviser CAT
We are planning a webinar soon to discuss the changes and provide more clarity for all, and you will soon receive an email with the details about the webinar; looking forward to meeting you all there. You can contact me via Podio chat if you need any immediate clarifications. -
I'm just finding it a little bit disrespectful that literally everybody vocals how bad this decision is, how shortly you guys gave notice (smell like out of cash) and how everyone demands an extension to be prepared, yet the answer is "Yeah, we go ahead anyways." and the best you could offer are webinars to discuss the decision you made (which is seemingly unchangeable) + explain the multiplication of invoices to come soon.Â
But hey, it is your business decision.Â
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Anantha Krishnan A S Thanks for your reply. I've tried contacting you by Podio chat as requested, but I can't message you for some reason. Please could you get in touch? Thanks
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David Galloway there are good alternatives out there, but Airtable is not really an option. Its missing for instance relations across workspaces, automations lack power...
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