Sharetribe pricing changelog

Change: Build plan price from $29/month to $39/month

Change type: Increase

Legacy pricing for existing customers: yes

Why this change:  The earlier hypothesis we had about the impact of making "Build" a paid plan turned out to be correct. We have started seeing more founders go live with their marketplaces after this change. Still, a surprisingly large number of founders remain in the Build plan for a long time. We believe it makes sense to lower the barrier between the Build plan and the Lite plan further, to create an even stronger incentive to launch faster.

Change: Plans "Onboard" and "Launch" replaced by new plans, "Lite" and "Pro"

Change type: Decrease (mostly)

Legacy pricing for existing customers: Yes (if their pricing would have increased)

Why this change: The previous pricing scheme, introduced in October, put the lowest monthly price for launching a fully functional marketplace at $199. After a couple of months, we’ve come to the conclusion that this is too steep for a significant group of people, and as a result, lots of people find Sharetribe too expensive and never subscribe. We want to get back to a situation where it’s possible to launch a marketplace for less than $99/month. 

To achieve this, we’ve moved some features that were previously available in the cheaper "Onboard" plan (custom domain, custom outgoing email address) to the premium plan, which is now called "Pro", but allow transactions in the cheaper plan, which is now called "Lite". This change is a decrease for most people, but it’s an increase for those (relatively few) founders who want to first start their marketplace in an onboarding mode without transactions but still want to have a custom domain.

Change: Previously completely free "Build" plan now costs $29/month after a 14-day free trial

Change type: Increase

Legacy pricing for existing customers: Yes

Why this change: We previously introduced a completely free Build plan, anticipating that it would encourage more people to start building their marketplace and eventually launch it. However, this has not materialized. Instead, we’re seeing many founders create free accounts and build their marketplaces, but they refrain from launching. We’ve come to the conclusion that having to move from a completely free plan to one with a significant monthly cost is not creating an optimal incentive structure. 

Our belief is that you should launch your marketplace as early as possible, as this is when the true learning begins. We concluded that we need to nudge founders in this direction, and asking them to pay after the free trial seems like a good way to do that. This change reduces the difference between the Build plan and the lowest plan that allows a Live environment. At the same time, it makes delaying launch a bit less tempting, as there’s a cost associated with the pre-launch period as well.

Another reason for this change is that the period spent in the Build plan is typically particularly costly for our customer service. We also discussed the option of not offering support to customers in the free plans, but rejected it: it seems quite important that we can offer high-quality support to founders during their critical early stages. Making Build a paid plan ensures we’re able to continue to do this in a sustainable way.

Change: The monthly prices of all regular plans of our legacy product, Sharetribe Go, increased by $20

Change type: Increase

Legacy pricing for existing customers: No

Why this change: We haven’t changed Sharetribe Go's pricing since 2016. At the beginning of 2024, our margins aren’t looking great: our costs have increased significantly due to the rampant inflation in 2022 and 2023, and as a result, we’re losing money every month. We’ve decided to take an exceptional action and increase the pricing for a significant number of existing customers.

While we are no longer selling Sharetribe Go at this point, we still have a large number of customers using it with its old pricing. We had taken the recent inflation into account when designing the pricing for the new Sharetribe, and we feel it makes sense to bring Sharetribe Go pricing to a similar level.

Change: Soft launch of the new Sharetribe

Change type: Launch of a new product with new pricing

Legacy pricing for existing customers: Yes

Why this change: We're launching a completely new Sharetribe product that combines the best parts of our two earlier products, Sharetribe Go and Sharetribe Flex. Switching from a two-product approach to a one-product approach is a massive change, which also calls for new pricing. Go and Flex had different pricing logics, and we need to combine them. In addition, our new product doesn't have the Custom Landing Page (CLP) extension, which is a significant part of Go's pricing. In addition, our costs have gone up in the past two years due to rampant inflation, so we also feel we should adjust our pricing to reflect this.

Our new lowest paid plan (Onboard) is priced slightly higher than Go's Hobby plan. Unlike Hobby, it offers unlimited users, the use of a custom domain, and removal of Sharetribe branding, but it doesn't offer the ability to initiate transactions. The new Launch plan is priced similarly to the former Go + CLP combination, as it offers similar features: it lets you launch a fully functional, white-labeled marketplace with a customized landing page and other content pages. We're also switching from semiannual to annual plans (previously, Go had semiannual and Flex had annual plans). 

As a result, the pricing goes down for those founders who earlier had Go + CLP and now choose the annual plan, but increases for those who had Hobby or Pro without CLP. The new Extend plan matches Flex’s pricing. 

We no longer have a time-limited trial: instead, building your marketplace is completely free, and you only need to subscribe when you go live. This is a significant price decrease. Earlier, you needed to subscribe to at least the Hobby plan after trying Sharetribe Go out for 30 days if you wanted to continue building your marketplace.

Change: From commission-based to transaction-volume-based pricing

Change type: Decrease & increase

Legacy pricing for existing customers: Yes (for a limited time)

Why this change: Sharetribe Go and Sharetribe Flex had different volume-based pricing methods. In Go, pricing was based on the number of users, while in Flex, the cost was based on Gross Merchandise Volume (the total amount of payments processed through the platform). Now that we have only one product, we need to unify its volume-based pricing.

We were not fully happy with either model. Go's pricing seemed obviously flawed, since we had plenty of customers with lots of registered users but very few transactions. With Flex, the problem was that some of our customers didn't process payments through their platforms, so they only paid the base fee, regardless of the size of their marketplaces. In some cases, this meant we were losing money on them. Meanwhile, the model was not working for customers who expected to have a very low margin from each transaction.

Our new pricing model is to charge a flat fee per transaction. The first 500 transactions in the Extend plan are free, and after that, the fee starts from $0.19 per transaction. There are volume discounts for high volumes, and the fee per transaction eventually drops to $0.05. 

This model is more closely aligned with our actual costs. The more transactions you have each month, the more burden you're putting on our infrastructure. At the same time, the number of monthly transactions is likely a good proxy of the success of a marketplace, as the purpose of any marketplace is to facilitate transactions. Thus, we feel that this pricing is aligned with the value our product provides.

According to our calculations, this means that our revenue will decline slightly on average. For our individual customers, the changes can be more significant: some, who process a lot of non-payment transactions, will see their pricing increase, while others, with a large average order value, will see their pricing decrease.

Change: Introducing the Flex Hold plan

Change type: Decrease

Why this change: Many founders building marketplaces with Sharetribe are suffering from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some concepts depend on physical spaces like gyms or event venues being open, and when such spaces are closed, these marketplaces see their gross merchandise volume (GMV) drop to 0. 

To help our customers navigate this challenging period, we're introducing the ability for them to put their existing marketplace into "read-only" mode. The marketplace can remain up, and the data is kept intact. You can continue working on its content and configuration, but users won’t be able to sign up, create listings, or initiate transactions. This plan is $49 per month, and it allows you to pause your business until the worst is over and you can get back to it.

Earlier, we introduced a Hold plan for Sharetribe Go, but a similar plan hasn’t been available in Flex so far. We've decided to call this new plan "Hold" as well. It's a bit more expensive than Go Hold, but it also comes with the additional feature of being able to access the live site and keeping it in a read-only mode.

Change: Go Custom Landing Page add-on is available for a monthly price

Change type: Decrease

Why this change: Earlier, the custom landing page editor for Sharetribe Go required manual actions from Sharetribe's team to set up the page correctly. This meant that there were costs involved for us for every setup, and for that reason, we only offered it for those willing to make a 6-month commitment. Now, we're introducing a fully automated editor that lets you set up your own landing page. Thanks to this automation, we're making the landing page add-on available on a monthly commitment, with the same monthly price it had earlier for the semiannual commitment.

Change: Sharetribe Flex price increase

Change type: Increase

Legacy pricing for existing customers: Yes

Why this change: When we launched Flex, we had to choose a price for it without any data. Now that Flex has been out for 1,5 years, we've noticed that it's clearly a premium product: only teams with adequate resourcing are able to utilize it fully, and those teams typically need quite a bit of support from us. To ensure we can offer this premium service sustainably, we're increasing Flex pricing for all new customers. We're offering everyone who started building with Flex before this change the opportunity to subscribe with the old price, as some teams have spent months building their marketplaces, and it doesn't seem fair to extend this increase to them.

Change: Sharetribe Flex launch

Change type: Launch of a new product with new pricing

Why this change: Sharetribe Flex is a completely new Sharetribe product. Earlier, Sharetribe was purely a no-code builder. This older product is now called Sharetribe Go. Sharetribe Flex, meanwhile, is a product developers can use to build a fully custom, unique marketplace for 10% of the time and cost compared to building a similar marketplace from scratch. Its pricing is premium compared to the no-code plans, as it requires more support from our side due to its advanced developer features. 

Change: New add-on (Custom Landing Page)

Change type: Launch of a new product with new pricing

Why this change: The initial version of Sharetribe Go didn't allow our customers to create their own custom landing pages. Instead, they needed to use a third-party tool like Wix or Squarespace. This workaround isn’t ideal for SEO, as the third-party landing page isn’t fully integrated into the marketplace. This changes with the introduction of the Custom Landing Page add-on (CLP), which lets you build a landing page where you communicate your unique value proposition. It's an add-on, available for extra cost and with a 6-month commitment, as each landing page setup requires manual work from Sharetribe's team.

Change: Starter plan renamed to "Hobby" and its pricing increased

Why this change: We've added lots of value to Sharetribe since its initial launch. We’ve also learned that it takes quite a lot of work from us to support marketplace founders, especially in their early stages. In addition, we've noticed that marketplaces created with the Starter plan rarely experience strong growth, while the Pro plan supports several growing marketplaces. To ensure our ability to sustain our business, and to encourage more founders to choose the Pro plan, we're changing the name of the lowest plan from Starter to Hobby and increasing its pricing to start from $79/month. 

Change: New pricing plan (Go Hold)

Change type: Decrease

Why this change: Earlier, whenever a customer decided to stop working on their marketplace, they'd lose access to it, and eventually, we'd remove all their user data. Data removal was important for privacy reasons, as some marketplaces could hold personal information from thousands of users.

At some point, we realized that there was a need for customers to put their marketplace on pause. However, it’s challenging for us to do this for free without an expiration date, since personal identifiable information should eventually be deleted if it's no longer in use. In addition, storing the old data in our databases and file storage systems still affects our infrastructure costs. 

We decided to introduce an affordable paid plan ($39 per month, paid monthly, or $29 a month annually) for those who wanted to maintain their data. In the new "Hold" plan, the marketplace isn’t accessible, but we guarantee that its configuration and data are preserved. Founders can return to work on the marketplace at any time by upgrading to our regular plans.

Change: Sharetribe Go launch

Change type: Launch of a new product with new pricing

Why this change: After being in private beta for more than a year, Sharetribe's launches its no-code marketplace builder globally, allowing anyone to start their own marketplace website like Airbnb, eBay, or Fiverr in a matter of days without any technical skills. Its pricing starts at just $39 per month with a free trial. Starting from $119 per month, you get a fully white-labeled marketplace. For $239 per month, you can scale your marketplace to 100,000 users.