Today, we're excited to announce the release of Cycle's new pricing model! With this new model, we aim to make our pricing far more straightforward and better suited for larger deployments and customers. While our current pricing model solved the needs of our customers for the last few years, we've learned enough that it's now time to make a change. Before talking about the new model, let's dive into how we got here. Moreso, the issues that have started to arise that resulted in this change.
The biggest problem, without question, was confusion around the model itself: there were many times where new users would reach out asking us to walk them through the RAM pool pricing. While users understood the model after a quick conversation, a pricing model shouldn't need an explanation. Additionally, we had a number of larger companies mention how Cycle's pricing model would almost punish them for scaling. For a number of these larger organizations, who had dozens of servers, the cost of utilizing Cycle would more than double their infrastructure cost, greatly reducing the savings Cycle generated for development teams.
Finally, our previous pricing model wasn't a proper fit for handling support costs -- tiers were so infrastructure focused that we weren't always best prepared for users that had dozens of developers and required more support time.
Our new pricing model removes the complexity that created a majority of the confusion around the existing pricing structure. As we'll detail more below, our goal was to have a pricing structure that grew with our users, from startup to enterprise and didn't require any extra communication to understand. With this goal in mind, we made a few significant changes:
Instead of charging per GB of RAM that was connected to the platform with the old model, our new pricing keeps things simple by charging a fixed cost per server per hour. Using the Lite tier with six servers? Easy. The first three servers are included in the cost of the Lite tier itself. The remaining three servers will cost $0.08/hour each, or ~$5.76/day for all seven. It's important to note that the cost per hour decreases to $0.06/hr for the Business plan.
Previously, all tiers had hard caps on both the number of servers and the number of users. This created a situation where some organizations would be forced to upgrade from the Lite plan to the Business plan to add a single developer to their hub, resulting in a 300% increase in cost. With our new pricing, all hard caps have been eliminated from our paid tiers. Need to add that extra developer or extra server? Simple. Predictable. And it won't break the bank.
One of the components of our previous model that did work well for both Cycle -- the company, and our users, was having an included amount of users and servers included with the base tier. While we could've approached a model of everything being purely usage-based, structuring the tiers this way allows our users to develop a level of predictability with their spend while also helping the company produce better forecasts for staffing and supporting our users.
While current users of Cycle will, by default, remain on their existing Generation 1 plans, we encourage all users to upgrade to Generation 2 pricing as the flexibility the new tiers provide are better suited for most cases. In fact, many of our customers will be able to reduce their monthly spend by adopting our new pricing structure.
💡 Interested in trying the Cycle platform? Create your account today! Want to drop in and have a chat with the Cycle team? We'd love to have you join our public Cycle Slack community!