Hi everyone -
I’m Jon Aniano, SVP of Product here at Zendesk.
A few days ago, we posted an article in our Help Center about upcoming pricing changes to Answer Bot and Flow Builder. We got a lot of feedback on that article and want to share what we’re hearing and begin to respond to some of your concerns.
To speak a little about why we’re making this change, we’ve heard from customers that with the current model, it is difficult to predict and forecast the number of resolutions needed per month. Monthly Active Users (MAU) will provide a more flexible unit of measure that makes it easier to analyze and predict usage.
When Flow Builder was first announced with messaging in 2021, we communicated that it would be unmetered for some time. Since then, we’ve invested heavily in Flow Builder, allowing our customers to build great customer experiences by automating a broad range of requests. Moving forward with our planned usage-based pricing model will enable us to continue improving this functionality and delivering the value you expect from Zendesk.
To speak to a few things that some users found confusing from the article:
- These pricing changes will not impact existing customers until their next renewal and no sooner than September 2023. In May, you can start monitoring your MAU usage in an Admin Center dashboard, which will help you forecast what may be needed as your business grows. Still, no caps or additional charges will be implemented until later in the year.
- Under the new pricing model, when you near the cap for your MAU usage, you’ll receive notifications to adjust your MAU as needed.
The other feedback we've heard largely centers around the following concern:
- The 1,000 MAU limit seems relatively low. When we began planning for this change, one of the things we considered was current usage. We wanted to find a limit that would allow a majority of customers to use the tool without significant price increases. It would also allow us to invest in much more advanced functionality for users who wanted to make Flow Builder a primary part of their service strategy. We found that a large percentage of our accounts fell below 1,000 MAU, which is how we landed on this threshold.
We are continuing to listen to your feedback and your comments.
I want to encourage you to provide additional feedback on this as we continue shaping up our plans. I'm also looking into setting up a live listening session with people who've provided feedback so far, so that I can hear and engage with you live.
I’ll continue to field questions and review and evaluate feedback here. Thanks, as always, for letting us know how you feel and think about Zendesk.
