Why GlassFrog is offering a totally free option

Pretty early on, we realized that having software support for Holacracy® is crucial. That’s why we built GlassFrog® in the first place. Before GlassFrog, we used an internal wiki, which was better than a Word document, but not the same as GlassFrog — a web app designed specifically to support Holacracy practice.

But, we’ve been hearing that our pricing model has been hindering some companies in their adoption of Holacracy. Smaller companies are finding the pricing prohibitive for their size and everyone is finding that the price-per-circle is too complex. We want to support the Holacracy community and ensure anyone who wants to practice Holacracy has access to the essential tools to do so. This is part of an overall initiative to offer a core toolset for implementing Holacracy at little to no cost, including the free resources on our website, the new Holacracy community of practice, and the recent Holacracy book. In a nutshell, we’re finding that our GlassFrog business model has been getting in the way.

So, effective Jan 2016, we’re offering a basic version of GlassFrog completely free, regardless of number of users or circles. We’ve carefully selected the functionality to make sure that our free users have all of the basics that they need to practice Holacracy effectively, no matter how many folks they want to add, or how many circles they want to build. We want everyone to succeed with Holacracy, regardless of budget.

For our paid users, we’re moving to a simpler price-per-user model. We had initially tried pricing GlassFrog both per-circle and per-user. However, we’ve found it is too complex for the need — folks new to Holacracy have a hard time determining how many circles they have and it adds a hurdle to use GlassFrog. Additionally, it is out of alignment with Holacracy principles — it encourages folks to think about operational decisions (e.g. cost for GlassFrog) in governance meetings when they’re creating new circles. So, for folks on our new Premium plan, we’re moving to a simpler model, and offering more advanced functionality. Notable features include the ability to pre-build proposals for governance meetings, make and process proposals asynchronously outside of meetings, view full meeting history, and search projects. We’ve also got some great new functionality planned on the horizon, like third-party integrations, granular privacy settings, and tension drill-down to see what tensions led to specific governance.

If you’re new to Holacracy or GlassFrog, I hope you give our little frog a test drive. And as always, please contact us if we can help you with GlassFrog, your Holacracy practice, or if you have feedback for us. We’re also on Twitter: @GlassFrogApp and @HolacracyOne.