the old pricing tier was having the Editors / Viewers difference, and only charging for the number of Editors per month, and it’s free for rest of all Viewers,
this is reasonable because most companies have a small data-science team, those are the ones responsible to create Observable pages, and can add rest of all company members as free Viewers, because all people outside of the data-science team are consumers only, they only need to consume the data-graphic, nobody out side of the data-science team need the Editor role, and most of them don’t have the JavaScript / SQL query knowledge, and don’t know how to create Observable data query,
Usually the size of company (# of all employees) can be 10x or even more times of data-science team, e.g. 20 people company with 2 people in the data-science team, and subscribing to Observable only need to pay for the 2 Editors, aka the size of data-science team,
But reading this 2024/2 announcement, it seems no longer have the free Viewers, and you want to charge for all 20 users of the company? and 10x grow your revenue? I would say no way,
@tx0c We are looking at viewer pricing models to better support this use case. We rolled out this change 10 weeks ago and have since spoken to many customers who shared how this was impacting their ability to scale the use of Observable within their organizations. You can expect new viewer pricing in the near future.
FWIW, I was just moving through the upgrade path and went from “take my money!” to “omigosh what!?” I have only two or three editors at any time any many viewers in the company. Had to hit the brakes hard.
We are making good progress on our viewer pricing… in the meantime, if anyone wants to discuss this in person, please reach out to support@observablehq.com. We would love to learn from your use case and discuss options.
from Pricing for teams of all sizes | Observable page now we see the new pricing, now the viewer’s pricing is almost half of the editor, it’s better than the previous 2024/2 model of all paying editor pricing but still not good,
$22/month for each editor, $10/month for each viewer
consider the small company with 20 people in total with 2 editors in data science team, this pricing model is increasing the cost from 2 editors to plus 20/2 seats, Or say, the cost of using Observable is now 5X of previous;
Another medium company with 200 people would have a similar less than 20 seats in data science team, would hit by similar 20X editors cost increased to 100X editors cost,
If can never get the free viewer pricing back, and if you ask me what is a fair pricing, I would say maybe viewer pricing at 1/10 of editor pricing is fair; the viewer’s seat are just for rest of all people in the company to occasionally have a look of the data, each of them is using even less than 1/10 time of a editor seat use, they’re doing nothing with data, shouldn’t be paying half of an editor seat’s pricing.
