Pricing for the CI/CD catalog
Background
The CI/CD component catalog will be the SSOT for any CI template. Users could publish a CI template from their repository which then be made available for reusing by any users. (You can read more on our vision in the CI/CD catalog epic)
What this issue is all about?
The catalog will have two flavors
- Public catalog - free for all where everyone can access, view, use, and contribute.
- Private catalog - to be used internally by an organization, users can discover and reuse the templates that are available and authorized by their organization.
In the first iteration we plan to introduce the private catalog, this issue is about discussing the licensing strategy and which tier a private catalog belongs to.
Licensing strategy
why not make it a free feature? I don't believe this is really a question the private catalog is better suited as a paid feature because it aimed to solve problems for teams within the organization, such as discovering, collaborating and sharing CI configuration. the real question then should it be an Ultimate or Premium feature? there are a good reasons for both.
Premium first, Ultimate second
The first approach is to introduce the private catalog in the premium tier and build additional ultimate features on top.
Why premium first?
- This feature is a match to our buyer based pricing model since the main users for this catalog will be developers within all types of organizations (SME and large) and central teams that manage their CI template repository (mainly Sasha and Priyanka)
- From a competitive point of view Private orb is a free feature in Circle CI, so if the private catalog is a paid feature we should make it Premium which is much more accessible by our users.
- Our customers have already built processes to overcome this problem, which means that our solution will not provide the right incentive for them to upgrade to ultimate at day one.
The path to Ultimate will be the land and expand strategy, using this approach we are aiming to maximize our adoption amongst our paid customers, once dependent on the catalog we can identify and prioritize strategic features that could become an upsell opportunities for ultimate.
From initial discussions several features that come to mind (and I am positive more will come as we'll release an MVC version of the catalog):
- Promoting CI templates that activate Ultimate features - we can identify strategic features that utilize ultimate features which we can promote within the catalog.
- Visibility into templates usage - allow administrators to see where a particular template exists and utilize in a project, this help identify both inactive template and strategic templates that are been used across the organization and need to be delt with carefully.
- Enforcing yaml variables - Allowing templates authors to enforce users to configure variables to a template
- Components configuration - Allow users to configure a template before utilizing it
- Blocking users from seeing uncertified templates - control the level of visibility among your users
Ultimate first
An alternate approach is to introduce this feature in the Ultimate Tier
Why Ultimate?
- This feature is a match to our buyer based tiering decisions, since it plays with transformation around unified developer experience which is an executive interest
- This feature is aligned to our Pricing Themes by being a tool for portfolio managing CI/CD Templates
- This feature can support the compliance and enforcement of templates across projects, making it a natural fit for our pricing themes
- Lastly, the CI/CD Catalog provides support for organizations use of CI/CD, also aligned with the "transformation" sell of the three tiers
- We can always downgrade the feature to premium
- The gross revenue projection based on this model, is slightly higher in Ultimate (100K for 3 years).
I would like to hear your opinion on where do you think this feature belongs?