23rd June 2020

Spojit’s Time-based Pricing “Integrate More for Less”

Cloud computing is booming and businesses today are spoilt for choice when it comes to cloud based applications. An ever-increasing number of software as a service providers is making it increasingly difficult to choose not only the right provider for your business needs but also the right subscription plan to meet your needs.

In the systems integration space, pricing is most commonly based on volume. The usual subscription plan grants you a certain amount of tasks or actions each month, and impose additional limits on the applications you can connect. This sounds reasonable, right? Not so fast!

Consider you are running an online retail business where you have chosen WooCommerce as your e-commerce platform and Unleashed Software for your inventory management. You have 100 products in your catalogue which need to be kept in sync between the two systems. Let’s say you only want to update your stock levels once a day at midnight; with volume-based pricing, you need a subscription plan with at least 3100 tasks (31 days multiplied by 100 product per day). This very limited integration scenario suitable only for very small businesses who are just starting up would usually fit into a subscription plan costing around $90 per month.

Now let’s look at the same example but plug-in Spojit’s time-based subscription plans. Based on our latest testing and evaluation, the Spojit Lite platform is able to do the same daily task in as little as 5.5 seconds. Taking average duration of 6 seconds, Spojit’s Starter Plan includes two hours of processing time which allows you to run the same scenario 1200-times. Compare the difference of 3,100 tasks on a volume-based plan, to 120,000 tasks on a time-based plan.

You may think that you will never need that many tasks, however it is quite easy to get to that number, even when running a small business. A usual online retail business uses several cloud applications – one for e-commerce store, another for inventory management, shipping, customer management, marketing, the list goes on. This means multiple integration scenarios to synchronise orders, products, stock levels, and customer data between the applications. Not to mention the intervals required. Product data such as prices or entirely new products can be synchronised once or twice per day (scheduled), however stock levels are changing constantly and to avoid overselling in your e-commerce store you need a near real-time sync (webhooks/triggers). All these factors need to be considered when choosing the right plan.

From our experience, even a small business (twenty sales a day) with three scenarios and a hundred products in their catalogue requires at least 10,000 tasks each month. As the business grows, more frequent synchronization is required. With volume-based pricing this get expensive, very quickly.

Technology is constantly improving. Communication channels are getting faster while cloud infrastructure cost is getting cheaper, yet many integration software providers do not pass that savings onto you! Most integration providers will consider you as a mid to large enterprise if you need as little as 100,000 or more tasks; and they will charge you accordingly with the usual cost being several hundreds of dollars each month.

We here at Spojit believe that our time-based pricing is the new way forward and the only way of making cloud application pricing fair for you and your business. Through innovation and the use of cutting-edge technologies, we are able to minimise our costs and pass that savings onto you via innovative time-based pricing, offering you the best possible price.

Spojit offers a 30-days free trial of the ‘early release’ platform on all subscription plans starting from USD $29 per month.