Getting charged per user can be a great deal if you’re a small company looking for a simple file sharing platform. But large companies who need a complete file sharing, storage and management platform for a multitude of users are getting a raw deal if they get charged by the user.
Charging per user is pretty standard for most SaaS tools because it’s cost-effective for small businesses. That’s why our entry-level cloud plans follow that structure.
But many SaaS tools, including our competitors, charge enterprise-sized businesses on a per user basis. This makes sense for the provider, but it puts an unfair burden on enterprises with a large employee count. That’s why we’re changing up the enterprise pricing model for file sharing and storage. With SmartFile’s FileHub™ platform, all of your users, current and future, can be added at no charge.
Keep reading to learn why SmartFile lets you add as many users as you want for one flat fee on our enterprise platform and only charges per user for smaller cloud accounts.
Why Make Adding Users More of a Hassle?
Large file sharing corporations like Dropbox and Box either charge per user, per month or give you only up to a certain number of users before they start charging. Even with their costly enterprise platforms, extra users still don’t come free. Forcing the small business pricing model on enterprises is basically nickel-and-diming your clients.
This type of setup is exactly what SmartFile chooses not to do for our enterprise on-premises or unlimited cloud customers. Policies like the ones above force large businesses to increase their investment with every new employee and client, and this limits scalability. SmartFile prides itself on scalability, and that’s why we include price, hardware and users in our pricing model. We’re looking to deliver the best total cost of ownership for both enterprise and small business clients.
Cloud Pricing: Why Per User Makes Sense
When you’re a small business, adding a few dollars per user makes a lot of sense. With many of these companies sitting between two and 10 employees, they don’t want to pay enterprise costs for enterprise-grade services.
For SmartFile, our entry-level cloud customers still get the works compared to the competition. For our Business and Business Plus cloud customers, they will often find they get more storage, accessibility or branding options for the price. And because we charge per user, many find that it fits their growth pattern better.
FileHub™: A Feature-Rich Offering With Unlimited Users
At some point, a business scales so large that a per user pricing model doesn’t make sense for the customer. It’s one thing to pay for additional services and features, which you get with our on-premises or unlimited cloud accounts, but it’s another thing to constantly check your budget to ensure everyone can have a SmartFile account.
Ultimately, charging per user for enterprise companies can inhibit growth and force administrators to put multiple people on the same account in order to save money; this negatively impacts compliance, governance and user adoption efforts. Our pricing model shouldn’t force our customers to make those decisions.
SmartFile enables businesses of all sizes to add and import all their users, clients, contractors, consultants, and whoever else to their account without any risk of increasing their cost. By allowing for unlimited users, SmartFile has gone against the grain of business file sharing charging per user and instead based pricing on storage alone.
The Future of Pricing: The Hybrid Model
It’s time for businesses using file sharing platforms to rethink how they should be charged. Completely changing how the file sharing pricing model may cause a little hesitation for businesses because it’s new, but think of it this way: Should you be punished for growing?
That’s exactly what happens when file sharing providers charge by user. We’re flipping the script on pricing because we want to see your company succeed, and we want to make it as hassle-free as possible.
We find the idea of forcing small businesses into enterprise pricing models and vice versa to be archaic and limiting to our customers. This is due to the issue of constant cost increase and causes customers to take a baby-step approach to growth.
Overall, enterprises should be able to scale users without limits and small businesses should able to receive enterprise-grade products without enterprise-level cost.
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