We moved off seats, and stopped punishing our best customers

For two years Margin cost a fixed amount per person per month, and for two years our best customers did the same thing: they kept a list of people they had not invited yet.

Support, legal, the two contractors, the person in finance who needed to read one page a quarter. Every one of them was a decision, and every decision went the same way, because a seat cost the same whether someone wrote a hundred pages or read one.

The tool works better with more people in it

That is not marketing, it is mechanical. A note is useless if the person who should pick it up is not there. Search is thin if half the company's knowledge never got written down because the author had no account.

So we had built a product whose value rises with headcount and a price that punished exactly that. The result was predictable and we watched it for two years: our healthiest accounts were the ones bending the rules.

What we charge for now

Agent runs. One note picked up and worked to a result is one run. Reading the page, pulling the sources and writing the draft is a single run however many steps it takes, and a run that fails does not count.

Everybody in the company can read, write and leave notes for nothing. You pay when Margin does the work instead of a person, which is the only moment it has clearly saved you something.

What happened

Median accounts added forty per cent more people in the first quarter. Revenue per account went up, not down, because the extra people wrote things that other people then needed agents for. And our support queue lost its single most common ticket, which was somebody asking whether a read-only seat was cheaper.