Hey everyone, I wanted to post a note to say that we’re following your feedback here (and other channels) and sharing it with relevant teams internally. As I mentioned in the blog post, we truly grow together with our community — especially those of you building businesses on Webflow — and truly value your feedback, even when it’s tough for us to hear. While we weren’t able to get feedback from every customer before making these changes, our overall approach for our new Workspace plans and how we structured our grace periods was deeply informed by conversations with our community. Your feedback will continue to be a major input as we continue working on our roadmap and any future pricing and packaging decisions. In the meantime, I wanted to take a moment to personally address some of the themes that came up in the comments.
One thing that really stood out throughout this change is the impact on international customers. As someone who immigrated to the United States from a country that has significantly different purchasing parity and unstable currency fluctuations, I empathize closely with this concern. What customers and clients in one country might see as a fair price for the value Webflow provides, others might see as a much bigger percentage of their income or business revenue.
I mentioned in the blog post that we’re exploring localized pricing for international customers to account for purchasing parity differences to help address this, but the process to fully get there is a highly complex one with legal, financial, and operational hurdles and constraints that will take time to resolve — potentially more time than the 1 year grace period for these pricing changes for existing site subscriptions. Based on your feedback here and in many other channels, we’ve decided that in parallel to figuring the full long-term solution to localized (that is, geo-adjusted) pricing, we’re going to create an interim international pricing relief program to take into account purchasing-parity factors in individual situations where your (or your clients, if they are in similar situations) are seeing elevated hardship based on pricing and currency changes. I don’t have a specific timeline to share here yet or information on which countries we’ll begin with in our pilot program, but we’re working hard to make sure this program is available well before the 1 year grace period for existing subscriptions expires.
Second, I’ve read a lot around how these new prices have impacted conversations with clients. Freelancers and agencies are some of our most passionate and impactful advocates, and I understand first-hand how difficult it can be navigating client conversations when service or platform costs change. While we hope that our grace periods help provide a long time period to have these conversations, we know you still have to make decisions around your own pricing and set expectations for the future with clients today. Because of this, we’re actively working on resources to help you benchmark your service pricing and help navigate these conversations.
Lastly, I want to directly address the perception that these changes were made due to pressure from our investors. It’s true that we’ve raised funds from investors to help us accelerate our mission to empower everyone to build for the web, but it’s absolutely not the reality that these changes were a result of pressure from them. These changes are rooted in our goal to create a sustainable business that aims to provide a ton of empowerment to our customers at a fair price, so that we can keep improving Webflow and you all can confidently rely on us to be here for decades to come. I’ve mentioned this several times in the past, but because of how much we struggled to bootstrap this business in the early years of Webflow and were on the brink of bankruptcy multiple times, we were downright paranoid in only choosing investors who would back our long-term mission and vision, and not those who would pressure us to make decisions we didn’t believe were the right ones for ourselves just so they can make more money somehow. In fact, because of the way we’ve structured our financings, our investors don’t even have any formal say in decisions like this and we’ve explicitly not promised any of our investors any kind of timeline to expect a return on their investments. There is no one collecting profits or dividends (including myself or the other founders) — because we’re investing every dollar of revenue into strengthening our team and improving our product. I genuinely believe that our investors are co-believers in the long term mission of Webflow, and they’ve had a huge part in advocating for things like our $10MM Community Grants Program that invest back into our community (which the vast majority of traditional investors out there would push back against).
I want to reassure everyone that the goal behind these changes was to carefully balance the needs of our community and our ability to continue investing into building an even more powerful and reliable platform both now and well into the future. These changes allow us not only to invest more into helping freelancers and agencies succeed on our platform, but also ensure that we can invest more into our foundations and create a better product and experience for all of you indefinitely.
Although I wish I could promise exact timelines on some of the actions we’re taking based on your feedback, I can promise you we are learning and building as quickly as we can with this community constantly in mind. I thank each and every one of you for sharing your feedback – we’re fortunate and grateful to have a group of users and customers as passionate as this, and we don’t take that for granted.
