The New Pricing Model for Kapiche

Here’s what affects you, as an existing or future user of Kapiche:

• Data Units are used for uploading data, rather than running analysis. We received feedback of customers hesitating to ‘try different analysis’ on their data because they didn’t want to use up Data Units. The aim of this change promotes experimentation, sharing, and exploration of data without restriction.
• One Data Unit = one row in your data source. When you upload a survey containing 10,000 responses, it will consume 10,000 Data Units.
• Your Data Unit balance has not changed. You’ll most likely get more value per Data Unit, so we thought it’d be nice to give existing customers a thank-you bonus rather than recalculating Data Units.
• Plans have changed. We now have three pricing tiers with monthly and yearly billing options (instead of just having one monthly and one yearly plan). We’ll be emailing existing users to request which plan they’d like to be switched over to. You can view the new pricing tiers here.

I’ve written a more detailed summary of the changes below, for those who are interested.

Data Units

The old usage model was based on Text Excerpts, which were also called Data Units.

The old Data Unit definition:

A Data Unit, or Text Excerpt, is a block of text up to 2 sentences long and doesn’t cross paragraph boundaries.

There were a couple problems with this. Mainly, it’s really hard to predict and gauge your usage. Also, the definition is unecessarily complicated and was invented a long time ago based on an old product direction.

The new Data Unit definition:

A Data Unit equates to one row in your data source.

Upload an Excel table with 1,000 rows of data? That’ll use 1,000 Data Units.

Pulling in 5,000 responses from Qualtrics? That’ll use 5,000 Data Units.

Simpler, easier to manage, and more useful for the type of data our users tend to work with — free text survey responses.

Data Unit Consumption on Data Upload

We asked customers how they felt about using Data Units. The response was that it was mostly okay, however they were hesitant to try different analysis settings or let other departments run analysis for fear of using up Data Units.

We didn’t like that users were so scared to use up Data Units to run an analysis. We asked ourselves:

What’s the best way to manage usage with as little impediment as possible?

Option 1: Restrict based on amount of data stored (similar to the Dropbox model). Perhaps a nice short term solution, but as a user’s data inevitably accumulates, it becomes unreasonable to pay to upgrade the storage amount. We also don’t want users to feel like they should delete potentially useful ‘old’ data to save on allocated space, especially considering we’re including more and more features based around tracking changes and trends in your data over time.

Option 2: Restrict based on number of Projects. This turns out to be a very inconsistent model, as users may only ever need one Project with a ludicrous amount of data. Another user, however, may need many Projects with smaller amounts of data in each. There’s no way to tell which size company needs which number of Projects. Having no restriction at the data level wasn’t feasible from an economical standpoint, either.

Option 3 (the winner): Restrict based on data upload. This was the option we chose. The principle is simple and easy to understand: you pay for the data you upload into Kapiche. This doesn’t have the problems the previous two options have; larger companies will generally have more data, along with the budget + return-on-investment for analysing that data. There’s no penalty for storing or accumulating a large dataset in Kapiche, and no drawback for running as many analyses you want on your data either. The downside is there’s a potential issue when users upload messy data, or accidentally upload the wrong data (but this problem existed in the old usage model, too). We’re trying to figure out a way to ensure our users upload clean data, but that’s a tricky problem to solve.

Pricing Plans

The old pricing plans were only two plans (monthly and yearly) without much flexibility on usage.

The new plans follow a more familiar structure: three tiers with monthly/yearly billing options. Not too much to write here — you can view the pricing plans here.

We hope these changes roll out smoothly; it’s no small thing to overhaul your pricing model and introduce new pricing plans. Even if it might be improvements all round, we expect some inertia to change. We are very, very open to talking to our customers. If you’re an existing customer with any concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us.