A premium tier plan or short term contract to focus on improving webflow for professional designers, business, agency and enterprise users?

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I feel it’s fair to say that over the past few years webflow has strived more to be squarespace / wordpress clone in an attempt for the mass market, than it has cater for its original target market of professional designers, creative agencies and enterprise. Personally that upsets me a great deal.

It is also fair to say that as each of us in the original target market grow our businesses on webflow, our need of stability and reassurance of a long-term available environment that doesn’t compromise on security, reliability, efficiency and basic features increases.

The current state of the wishlist and the latest push out of a buggy, inefficient style panel reflect this more than ever. I have no idea whether this would go anywhere, but I’m interested if there’s enough pro users and agencies like myself trying to build more than just fancy one-pagers that would be prepared to either pay a bit more per seat for a premium membership to ensure our unique items and considerations are prioritised uniquely in the development queue and to establish more solidarity of long-term availability on a closed source product, or pay more on a short term temporary basis to see some of their critical business needs addressed.

To be clear, I’m not looking for new fancy interactions or zapier integrations, I’m looking for a higher prioritisation for improvements that business customers would be concerned about such as the below:

  • Security: User permissions for team accounts - currently anyone can edit or delete any site or asset in the account without restriction

  • Security: Stop files still being publicly accessed online at their old URL after they have been deleted

  • Security: 2FA for content editors rather than risking a site being compromised? (Ecommerce increases the risk too)

  • Security - Unsubscribe email headaches?

  • Security – A proper compliance audit completed and made available

  • Necessary functionality - Table Support

  • Necessary functionality - Unpublish pages without having to republish the entire site (removing job postings, news articles etc without having to push out partially finished page changes)

  • User experience / White labeling - Having files hosted on the site URL rather than a random webflow domain, along with a much better white label support generally without competition for our customers eyeballs.

  • Speed and scalability - Re-integrating Fastly for HTTPS sites

  • Stability – None of this bugginess and rushed releases that are becoming ever more frequent

  • A contractual commitment and formal back-up plan that translates in the event of a Webflow company sale, our sites and our access to the developer software are not at risk and will be available and supported. In the event of closing the business due to bankruptcy or other, necessary redundancy is available to ensure that CMS sites can continue to be available, edited, build upon, and the designer continues to be available for new builds. My off the cuff thought for this is an open-source desktop app release that allows export to AWS or similar made available to plan members as an “insurance policy” if ever things went southbound.

I’m sure many of you have unique business and client concerns of a similar nature to the above that are more than just new features for the masses. Finally, personally, I wouldn’t consider paying more per site hosted as that affects my customers. But I would consider paying more for my plan or on the shorter term as that affects my business.

Keen to hear everyone’s thoughts and ideas :slight_smile:

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You bring up some interesting points here, and I have had some of these concerns myself. It is why I will continue to build certain sites on other platforms. The biggest fear I have is what if the company is sold, and then everything gets sucked into some large megalith corp who has no interest in maintaining any regard for the current users of the platform. Regardless of whether they are novice or pro users. I have listened to the last two video interview with Vlad, and like his vision for the company and see why they might be making some of the decisions they are making to try to reach a broader market.

That being said, I can imagine all hands are on deck for their ecommerce product as it was a big missing piece in their puzzle. I would love to see user login areas, as well as basic logic functionality, etc, but again… time, resources, etc… They can only do so much… In my experience, companies like this tend to focus in on the things that are driving the most revenue. Right now that means working to remain competitive with web builders that the average Joe can use. I have to imagine some of the things you are referencing will remain low on the priority list until some large company comes in and demands the features for compliance, and is willing to pay for their development directly.

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Thanks Raymmar, appreciate your input! Just to be clear, I have no problem whatsoever with Webflow seeking to grow the product. That benefits everyone, and the platforms longevity. I’m just suggesting that while doing so there’s a balance to be had to also continue to show an interest and grow the pro user base. (I suspect many relegate the use of webflow for basic concerns similar to the above).

For every giant ecommerce / IX2.0 release with thousands of work hours, I would hope a team account could gain basic user permissions to hide a site from a freelancer, and for every total re-recording of tutorial videos from scratch and redevelopment of a style menu, there would be time to implement a simple permanent delete button. Effectively, keep things steadily ticking along on both sides of the user spectrum.

Knowing that dollars drive development, I’m in complete agreement on that front and am fully suggesting I’d be happy to contribute to prioritize some of the business/security functionality that sees less interest from the wider user base, but is common sense security / functionality in our sector. Effectively, what I was wondering is if enough members of the community were interested in a sort of “pro member group”, throwing in $1 - 2k a year or so to gain 50-100% of 1 or 2 developers focus between us and some special long-term contractual terms, effectively crowd sourcing for the prioritization of these and similar features and ensuring our businesses for the long term.

Simply a paid sub-wishlist and some contractual perks that targets our customer concern areas that would otherwise be years away on the roadmap. I’m also interested if the idea of which would at least interest the Webflow team, or if there’s any other practical alternative to waiting years for compliance features and overcoming continued business succession concerns for growing a business on webflow.