Why User-Based Pricing?

It’s no secret: in the landscape of non-profit technology vendors, it is hard to find one that doesn’t price their product based on the number of database records your organization has.

In almost every scenario, this practice is universally bad for you as the customer and results in ever-increasing subscription fees that grow regardless of changes in your organization.

But why is record-based pricing so bad?

Without significant effort, your database size and therefore your subscription fee will constantly grow.

A non-profit CRM is constantly taking in new sources of data. Sometimes data is manually entered by staff or automatically created by a new donation or form that’s been filled out online or even imported from another system. This constant stream of data, coupled with factors such as donors providing slight variations of their information, often results in new database records being created that are duplicates.

Additionally, it’s common to also have limited to no ability to manage or merge duplicate records, making it even more difficult to stop your total number of records from increasing constantly.

This results in:

1. Your subscription fees are all but guaranteed to increase over time, eating up more of your annual budget even if your organization doesn’t change at all.
2. A database full of duplicated information that makes meaningful data analysis and informed decision-making more difficult. If 25% of your donor count is made of duplicates, this can skew your analysis and more importantly, decisions.
3. In extreme cases, this can directly impact your donors, resulting in duplicate communications, using an incorrect name or other incorrect data points that directly harm your relationships with them.

The answer: User-Based Pricing.

This isn’t a new concept: pretty much every other form of CRM is priced by the number of users, as it’s the most logical and fair way to price a CRM product. At some point, many years ago, someone in our sector decided to switch that pricing model because it was significantly more profitable for the vendors, and the entire landscape of providers followed suit.

At Ethos, we’ve joined the small number of providers in the space that offer user-based pricing, as it’s the fairest way to price a CRM product.