Last week we took a feature out from behind a paywall on Handee, the compliance system we build for multi-site property operations, and gave it to everyone on the free plan.
Suppliers do not usually volunteer that they have done this, so here is the reasoning and what it cost.
The feature, and who was paying for it
Handee has two sides. Operators, the property and facilities teams who pay us, and vendors, the contractors and service firms who do the work. Operators send jobs out. Vendors bid for them.
Release 1.4 gave vendors a simple picture of how they are doing: how much work reached them, how much of it they quoted for, how much they won, and the difference between jobs they were invited to and jobs they found on the open marketplace.
We had built it behind the paid vendor plan. Twenty euro a month.
Why we moved it
Vendors are the supply side of a market. They join free, they leave free, there is no contract and no notice period. A vendor who decides that bidding through us is not worth the effort does not phone anyone to say so. They just stop opening the jobs we send.
The operator on the other side, the one paying us, sees nothing for weeks. Then their jobs start coming back unquoted, and by the time anyone asks why, the cause is months old and invisible.
What an operator buys from Handee is not really a piece of software. It is a pool of contractors who are verified, current on their credentials, and actually interested in the work. Charging the contractors for sight of their own numbers protects a twenty euro line and puts the thing the operator is buying at risk. That is a poor trade even before you consider that the paid vendor plan is waitlist-only at the moment, so the charge was collecting almost nothing anyway.
What it cost us
The paid vendor plan is now a weaker product than it was on Monday. It keeps a higher bidding limit, more user accounts, and a longer record retention window, and it has lost one of the few things that made it obviously worth buying.
We would rather sell a thinner plan honestly than a fuller one that quietly discourages the contractors our customers depend on.
The same question, asked about data
The other half of 1.4 was the first marketing analytics we have ever run. Until this month we genuinely could not tell you where a new signup came from.
Adding that raises an obvious question for anyone whose company data sits in our system, so the answer is short.
Nothing you do inside Handee is measured by an outside company. Not a page, not a click. The addresses of pages inside the product contain your organisation's identifiers, your job references, and one-time links from invitation and password emails. None of that goes anywhere near an advertising business, and there is no setting that would turn it on.
On the public website, where the analytics do run, consent is off until you give it and one click in the footer takes it away again. We count three things, and only three: someone signs up, someone confirms their email address, someone starts a subscription. There is no general-purpose tracker sitting behind those three waiting to be pointed at something else.
That has a price too. We cannot watch how customers move through the product in any analytics tool, so those questions get answered out of our own records instead, which takes longer and costs more. We think that is the correct amount of work for the promise we make.
Why any of this should matter to you
If you are choosing who to hand a slice of your operation to, the brochures will not separate the candidates. Every one of them will tell you what their software does.
The more useful question is what a supplier refuses to do, and what those refusals cost them. A company that has never turned anything down has either been lucky or is not telling you.
Ours are on the record. We gave away a paid feature because charging for it was quietly damaging the thing our customers actually buy. We closed off a whole category of measurement about our own customers, and now do that work the slow way.
The number we promise clients is the human time recovered on the work they hand us. A promise like that is only worth something from people who will also tell you what they chose not to do.