Field notes › Product
Why every plan gets every feature, including the new ones
Most software you buy has a table with three columns and a lot of ticks. The cheapest column does the thing you came for. The middle column has the feature you will need in six months. The top column has the one that would actually fix your problem, and it costs three times as much.
We do not do that, and it is worth explaining why, because it is a business decision rather than a moral position.
Tiering punishes the customer for their own success
Feature tiers work by identifying which capability a customer will eventually need badly and pricing against that need rather than against the cost of providing it. It is effective. It is also a strange thing to do to someone whose operation you are supposed to be helping.
In labour hire the effect is specific and unhelpful. The client portal is usually the upsell, so smaller firms cannot give clients visibility and keep answering phone calls. Compliance checks are usually the upsell, which means the firms most exposed to a compliance failure are the ones running without the protection.
The features people are willing to pay most for are the ones that prevent the worst outcomes. Charging extra for those is charging extra for not having an incident.
What we do instead
One price per organisation, stepped by crew size, with the whole platform on at every size. The roster, the compliance engine, the worker portal, the client portal, inductions, onboarding, notifications, the lot. A 25-person operation has exactly the software a 400 person operation has.
The number that changes with size is the price, because a bigger crew genuinely costs us more to host, support and back up. That is a cost-based reason for a price difference, which is a different thing from finding the feature you cannot do without and putting a wall in front of it.
New features are included too, and that is the part that matters
Included at purchase is easy to say. The real test is what happens six months later when something significant ships.
Plenty of vendors ship the good new thing as an add-on, or as part of a new higher tier, and the customers who have been paying for two years get an email about upgrading. We do not, and there is no asterisk on it: when something lands, everyone gets it at the price they are already paying.
Recently that has meant a full notification system for crew, clients and the office, configurable onboarding with your own steps and a gate, an inactive state for workers between swings, a rebuilt shift editor with clash detection, and a phone roster built for how people actually hold a phone. None of it changed anyone's bill. The what's new page lists it.
The honest catch
There is a trade-off and it is fair to name it. Flat pricing per organisation means small operations pay more per head than they would on a per-seat plan. A ten person crew rostering itself is genuinely better off with a cheap per-seat app, and we say so on the pricing page and in the comparisons.
The other catch is that we cannot do everything for everybody. A single tier means one product, so what gets built next matters a lot, and it is decided by a roadmap board inside the product where customers vote. That is a deliberate consequence of not having tiers: instead of building a premium version for the largest customers, we build the thing most people need next.
Why this is sustainable rather than generous
Two reasons, both practical. Supporting one version of a product is much cheaper than supporting three, and every hour not spent maintaining feature gates is an hour spent on the product.
And customers who have everything switched on get more value, so they stay. Retention is a better business than upselling people to the version that works properly, and it is considerably less irritating for everyone involved.
What to ask any vendor
Two questions worth asking, whoever you are buying from. Which features are not in the plan you are quoting me, and what happens to my price when you ship something significant next year.
The answers tell you what the relationship is going to be like well before the contract does.