Our journey from unlimited to a per-seat pricing model

Way back in 2020, when we decided to take our board management system to market, we faced a seemingly impossible task. We needed to get noticed in a market dominated by big board portal vendors with multi-million-dollar budgets and large customer bases.

At that stage, our system was fast becoming feature-compatible with the leading board portals, and our marketing strategy began to centre around providing a more affordable option. Out of this, was born our unlimited user model.

This model seemed to perfectly suit our emerging focus on not-for-profit (NFP) organisations, especially since the spirit of giving back has always been a core value of Syncrony Digital throughout our 25 years in business.

The Limits of Unlimited User Pricing

On the surface, offering an all-you-can-eat pricing model seemed perfect for organisations with limited budgets. However, as time passed, we realised that our model had a weakness.

This weakness was directly tied to the number of users an organisation required. Specifically, as user numbers decreased, the unified unlimited price became increasingly expensive on a relative basis.

For instance, let’s say the average small NFP in Australia needs a 10-user board portal.

Our unlimited NFP price in this case was $1,200 per year, which works out to $120 per user annually.

Massive Savings for Small NFPs

When you break it down on a per-user basis, each user costs 60% less.

Now, let’s compare this to our new per-user pricing model, which charges $48 per user per year. This offers a significant $72 saving per user for NFPs.

So, for a 10-user organisation, this would cost $480 a year, a saving of $720 compared to our previous model.

Non-Profits Are Our Mission

When we realised this, we knew that in order to put our money where our mouth is, we needed to move to a per-user model. This would help empower governance and transparency for a whole segment of the NFP market that previously couldn’t afford the proper tools.

Implementing Per-Seat Billing

As always in the world of software development, making our new vision a reality was much harder than we anticipated. But we worked hard and have now completed the necessary steps.

We’re excited to announce that our new per-user system will be launching in June 2024.

And don’t worry, enterprise customers haven’t been forgotten. Our original unlimited user model is still available for large organisations (whether NFP or for-profit), who require on-prem or cloud-based implementation.

[Updated: March 2025]