Introducing new pricing

We've changed our pricing! This blog post explains why.

Today we're announcing a major update to how Beacon is priced. This change is a complete overhaul from the current licence-based pricing model, and is designed to provide a fairer, more manageable, and predictable price point for charities of all sizes.

These changes are now in effect for all new customers from today.

Already a Beacon customer? Visit this page to find out more about what these changes mean for you.

Why we're making changes

At Beacon our goal has always been to price in-line with the value that we're delivering:

We came up with Beacon's original pricing model in Budapest in an Airbnb overlooking the Danube. Lots of other CRM companies charged per-user, and it seemed reasonable to suggest that a charity who had more employees using the CRM would get more value out of it.

Beacon's per-user pricing model was created before we had any customers.

Things have come a long way since then! Hundreds of charities are now using Beacon every day - a responsibility that is both humbling while also being incredibly exciting.

As time went on, we realised that the per-user pricing model simply doesn't work in the charity sector. Many people work part-time and need infrequent access, and some people only need to access very specific parts of the database.

On top of this, we discovered that some customers were getting huge amounts of value from all of Beacon's features, and some were only using Beacon for basic contact management. It didn't seem fair to charge so much to customers you weren't getting the full value out of all of Beacon's CRM features.

Given all of the above, we went back to the drawing board.

We've spent the last 6 months carefully researching and discussing a wide variety of pricing approaches - and are now announcing our most significant pricing change ever.

What's changing?

Beacon new pricing is based primarily on three things:

1. The plan you choose
2. The number of contacts (people + organisations) you store in your database
3. The features you enable

On top of this:

• We're removing form limits (i.e. unlimited forms)
• 0% platform fees on Beacon forms (more below)

You can see all of this on our updated pricing page.

1. Your plan

The new pricing model offers three plans:

• Starter - for charities getting started with CRM
• Standard - for scaling CRM across your team
• Premium - for established charities requiring advanced CRM features

Each plan offers different numbers of users, max contacts, and features.

2. Contacts

The price of Beacon now changes based on the number of contacts you store in your CRM database. If your database grows or shrinks, your price will change to reflect this.

3. Features

We've reorganised the core Beacon platform to a standard set of features at a low price point.

You have the flexibility to add the features ("elements") you choose, each of which will affect the final price:

• Fundraising
• Memberships
• Ticketing
• Finance
• Email integrations
• Case management
• Volunteering
• Workflows
• Roles & permissions
• Portal

The price of these features automatically changes based on the number of contacts you have. (i.e. "Fundraising" will cost more if you have 50k contacts rather than 500 contacts)

Example: you're a fundraising team, and you've purchased the fundraising feature. If you want to start running events and selling tickets online, you might want to also purchase the events & ticketing feature.

0% platform fees on forms

Beacon's donation, membership, and ticketing forms are one of our most popular features. They're flexible, look great, are tightly integrated with the main CRM database.

In the past, we've charged a % fee on payments processed through Beacon forms. Many other online tools (e.g. Stripe, JustGiving, EventBrite, Donorbox) take a similar approach, or ask donors to "contribute" to the cost of payment processing:

In our new pricing model, Beacon charges absolutely nothing for payments processed through Beacon forms. We don't charge a fee, and we don't ask for any "contributions". (We'll still keep making Beacon forms better though!)

Beacon is now the most cost effective way to take donations online.

Payments through Beacon forms are processed via Stripe, GoCardless, and PayPal - they will still charge fees for payment processing. (This goes direct to them, Beacon never sees this.)

As I mentioned at the start of this blog post, we try very hard to provide a fair price point that scales in-line with the value we drive.

We've been very careful and considered throughout this process, and believe that this new model is a far better way of charging for Beacon.

If you're already a Beacon customer, you can find out more about the new pricing model here.

Got a question? Feel free to get in touch with us at support@beaconcrm.org.