The Flow Studio journey and July price increase
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I wanted to write an update about Flow Studio, my personal journey so far as a single founder, and announce that there will be a price increase at the end of July.
TL;DR
There will be an increase of Flow Studio subscription price to US$200/year after July. All existing subscriptions will be honoured and maintained at existing prices - so this month is the best time to come onboard and support my work Flow Studio.
If you are using Flow Studio - but don’t see enough value to subscribe. That’s fine - Flow Studio is a freemium product and there will always be a free tier. But I think it’d be alright to ask from time to time that you tell me what would be something that may entice you to change your mind? I am highly motivated to solve your needs and … make you a subscriber. :-)
Journey - what does Flow Studio do?
A year ago, friends ask me: John why do you write Flow Studio, what pain are you trying to solve? I said - I have more than 50 Flows. The response I got was weird looks - well John that’s just you, I wouldn’t build a product based on that.
Fast forward to today - hundreds of people have more than 50 Flows. Some people have more than me. If you support a service account that is a co-owner to many people’s Flows: that account has access to hundreds of Flows.
Consider IT that needs to support Thousands of Flows - what tools do they have?
The problem was never “if” the problem was always “when”. The reality is actually “too soon”
Flow Studio started with simply “Flow inventory management” being able to rapidly find, sort, filter and group with #hashtags our Flows in multiple ever-increasing environments.
We read pages of runs for each Flow - so we can answer questions such as “what has been running most recently” and “which Flows has been failing”. These are powerful features that are not available in the Flow maker portal.
We support bulk operations - multi-select runs and cancel. Multi-select flows and disable. Multi-select approvals and reject.
We added Edit JSON so power users has a quick way to dive into the core definition of a Flow and tweak that. You can do find and replace. Search for URLs or just move blocks around.
We added Contextual Runs - so makers can quickly make sense of a sea of runs and find the error they are looking for.
We added Sparklines so makers can get a bird’s eye view of what’s going on.
Admin view lets an user with environment administrator permission to see all the Flows made by people in that environment - invaluable for IT admins wanting a better overview of Flows in their environment. This is also an excellent view for a Service Account with P2 to be used as the owner of Team Flows.
Major Feature: Migrate
The most latest and significant feature is Migrate. We now support copying, updating and migrating a maker’s Flow(s) across different SharePoint sites and Flow environments. This is a one-to-many support that is not going to be available in the Flow maker portal, and something really necessary for SharePoint and Teams professionals. This allows a maker to create one flow, and copy it across one, twenty, fifty sites. We help makers keep them all up to date.
This is the main feature that we are raising the price of Flow Studio on. So if this is something you think you’ll need for half the price - get in now!
Founder
I’ve been a consultant for twenty years - and it’s really a dream to be able to take something I do for one customer and take it into a product.
It is also so much hard work - the main struggle is that the feedback loop for a startup is somewhat delayed and at times completely missing. Unlike a coding challenge - there’s no immediate “problem, debug, fix, done”. A business makes a decision and there’s really no idea if that’s the right decision. And there’s no way to find out for months, if ever, that a decision is right or wrong.
The opportunity costs of each decision, what should I be doing instead, what can I do in parallel. All the community work I still love to do so much, but now I wonder if I’m sabotaging my own startup while being distracted.
Distracted. Scary word. Extremely scary for a founder.
Anyway, I keep my sights on the goal. I’m certain the future of automation within Office 365 and across Microsoft is Microsoft Flow. With that in mind - there is no way a tool like Flow Studio isn’t valuable to a maker, and Flow governance isn’t valuable to a business. I intend to make my way towards that goal. I’m hoping you are all behind me, or alongside me, or cheering for me.
Let me know if you want a demo happy to visit in person or remote.
July Price Increase
Flow Studio Pro subscription is currently priced at US$10 per month or US$100 per year. There are two pricing updates that will go live at the end of July:
The price will increase to US$20 per month or US$200 per year. We believe the added value to Flow Studio over the year has dramatically increased its value. We also believe that as more and more makers are using Microsoft Flow - a solution like Flow Studio to help manage, migrate and rapidly troubleshoot Flows is necessary for the maker.
Australian businesses will be charged at AU$300 - this includes the currency conversion rate as well as inclusive GST, an Australian Tax Invoice will be issued. As an Australian I’m aware that we often feel we pay more than usual US prices, I hope we’d find it fair after conversion including GST.
The price increases are something we intend to do over time. As we keep adding features, we will consider raising the prices to match the value. But this is something we do when the value position of Flow Studio is so significant we actually consider the final price still a bargain for makers. Our promise to existing customers is that Flow Studio subscriptions will remain at the price that you signed up for, as a thank you over a much longer period of support from you. Thank you.
Special Offer: Collab365 Microsoft Flow Virtual Summit
I partner’ed up with the folks at Collab365 - running the Microsoft Flow Virtual Summit next week to offer a special Flow Studio deal for All Access Pass members.
Collab365: Microsoft Flow Virtual Summit is free if you can tune in during the live broadcast of the sessions. If you want to watch the recordings afterwards, you need to purchase an All Access Pass.
The All Access Pass also unlocks a serious bundle of discounts for many affiliated products and services. For Flow Studio - you will get $20 off the first year.
It means if you subscribe to Flow Studio (yearly) before end of July through this offer, you will pay $80 for the first year, and $100/year for subsequent years.
I’ll write more in the next blog post about how this would work.
Feedback
I have a need of something from all of you.
If you have used one of my Flow tips - then I would like you to try https://flowstudio.app - I seriously ask every Flow maker to try this tool and tell me what they’d like to see.
If you aren’t a subscriber, but would consider yourself my customer, friend or supporter - I’m always in need of founder and product feedback, I feel with you, I can indulge myself and directly ask for your feedback.
Please don’t feel pressured into subscribing if you don’t see the value clearly for you. Your feedback on what would make the product valuable to you is equally if not important than subscribing when you don’t feel like you need it.
Let me know in many ways:
Comments below
john.liu _at_ flowstudio.app
I thank you sincerely for reading this whole post all the way through here. I know raising price is tricky, I want to do it for the right reasons, and explain why I’m doing it. Anyway, you have one month!
