Redefining Pricing for Support

We deeply believe that support is best when it's a company-wide effort, not just the job of a single person or team – a belief shared by many of our customers. This philosophy not only permeates all our product decisions, but how we think about pricing too.

Most support platforms price their tools based on seats. Companies pay a monthly price for every person given access to the support tool and often pay for enterprise tiers to have access to one or two technical features. This model encourages support siloes and forces companies to choose who they assign licenses.

In developer-focused products, support and engineering are closely intertwined. If a customer reports a bug, multiple engineers may need to collaborate to resolve the issue. It doesn't make sense for companies to pay high monthly fees per person for their whole engineering team when most of them only use the tool every few days, at most.

So they don’t. Instead, companies are forced into recycling licenses, sharing passwords, and trying every trick in the book to avoid cutting off their entire team from support - the direct line to the customer. We want our pricing to make it easy to adopt Plain across the entire company.

We knew that a ‘seat-based’ approach wasn’t going to work… but what would?