A shop does not pay by the person any more

Software for shops is nearly always sold per user, and for a shop that is the wrong shape. A counter is worked by whoever is on shift: a manager in the morning, two part-timers in the afternoon, somebody covering on Saturday. Charge per person and one till costs four seats, and the business starts sharing a login, which is the last thing anybody should want at a till.

So we changed the unit. Rutba Commerce, Rutba Inventory and Rutba Orders are bought by the organization, on the volume of orders it takes.

What every tier includes

• Every member of staff. Unlimited users, on every tier. A seasonal hire costs nothing to add and nothing to remove.
• Every register. A second till is not a second licence. So is every kiosk on a shop floor, in Manufacturing, for the same reason: charging per terminal taxes the exact screen the product exists to put in front of people.
• Every channel. The counter, the website, the marketplace, the phone order somebody typed in: one catalogue behind all of them, and no per-channel charge.
• No share of a sale. Whichever payment provider you use is your business, and it costs you nothing here.

That last one is worth saying plainly, because a percentage of revenue is the industry’s favourite fee. It scales with your success rather than with our cost, and it quietly punishes the shop that grows fastest. We charge for the software.

Volume priced where volume is the cost

Orders are what the system does work for, so orders are what the tiers count. Go past your allowance and it is charged in whole blocks, and a part block is free, so an unusually busy December that spills a little over is not a surprise invoice.

The allowance is a number, written down, and the same number a licence carries. That matters more than the price: “generous” and “unlimited (fair use)” are not allowances, they are the absence of one, and they are how a bill arrives that nobody can check. Ours are figures on the page, and the rules that turn usage into money are the ones in one unit, one rater.

Free tiers, sized to be usable

Where the market starts free, so do we. And the free tier is sized to run a small shop rather than to expire the moment you rely on it. The same is true in Inventory, in the Relay, in Send and in Media, and Rutba Sign gives five envelopes a month with no card at all.

If you outgrow it, the next tier is a price on the page rather than a call. Only the enterprise tier is quoted individually, and that is a different sentence from “we cannot tell you right now”, which is a distinction the site now keeps carefully.

Where per user still makes sense

We did not abolish per-user pricing; we moved it to where the unit is honest. A CRM seat is a person’s desk. A Books seat is a person’s desk. A till is not a desk, and neither is a shop-floor kiosk or a rider’s phone. The question we now ask of every product is which of those it is, and the answer decides the unit before anybody argues about the amount.