We practice radical transparency here at data.world. It’s evident in everything we do— from how we interact with customers, employees, and investors to how we grow and support the world’s largest open data community. In fact, transparency is literally written into our mission statement as the world’s largest open data community. Enterprise data catalog pricing should be no exception.
(If you're asking yourself, "What is a data catalog?" Read our blog on the topic first before reading the rest of this one!)
How data.world approaches enterprise data catalog pricing
I recently spoke to an advisor who runs a major consumer Internet destination. He suggested that our pricing model should align with the unit of economic value customers get when they use our product.
In our case, our platform’s value to a customer should be directly tied to the number of people that use it.
Here’s why. Our platform was built for everyone— not just the “data people.” But you can’t get everyone to rally behind data they can’t access or don’t understand. As an enterprise data catalog provider, we must infuse data with meaning in order to empower everyone to answer business questions and make smarter business decisions. The more clarity and accessibility a company provides into their data, the more likely it is that they’ll create a data-informed workforce.
The delicious irony is that many data catalog providers purposefully keep critical data from their customers and prospects that could help in their decision-making process. I’m specifically talking about pricing. Repeatedly, we’ve heard from clients, prospects, and even industry analysts that confusing and complex pricing can offset any value that a feature-rich product can create.
That’s why data.world now has fully transparent data catalog pricing. No hidden fees. No gotchas. It’s all there for everyone to see.
Our licensing model includes four enterprise tiers as well as user-fees within each pricing package. We also make it super simple to move between tiers as your business needs change. And in keeping with our roots and mission, we will continue to offer low-cost subscriptions for individual users.
Enterprise Tiers
As the only cloud-native enterprise data catalog, all customers, regardless of tier, will have the latest version of our platform, with no software to install, manage, or upgrade. We can deploy enterprise-wide in minutes, dramatically accelerating time-to-value. That said, I’d like to call out some differences in each pricing category, so you can make a smart decision about what’s right for you.
data.world Essentials provides everything a company needs to build out a comprehensive data catalog. This tier includes enterprise metadata management, data management, agile governance capabilities that make it easy to roll it out to a broad swath of users.
data.world Standard extends the Essentials package, making it easier and safer for companies to connect on-prem data sources in a secure cloud environment. It also includes detailed audit logs for usage analysis and monitoring. Standard customers also benefit from white-glove implementation and strategic support for speedy or large-scale data catalog rollouts.
data.world Premier provides advanced technical data lineage that automatically infers detailed relationships at the column-level and provides a rich interface for tracing upstream provenance, downstream impact analysis, and tracking changes to metadata and lineage.
data.world Premier Plus delivers enhanced security and compliance requirements for enterprises that need capabilities like environment isolation, direct connectivity, key management, additional liability or other legal, financial, regulatory, compliance, and contractual provisions.
User Tiers
Each enterprise tier starts with 10 users, but we encourage our customers to scale well beyond that. To make that easier, we keep user fees low and easy to understand. And we only have one “class” of user, unlike our competitors that force people into a “class system.”
We don’t think anyone should have to worry about whether they’re a consumer or producer of data. Everyone in data.world is a citizen of the data ecosystem and has equal ability to contribute.
Remember that part about aligning “with the unit of economic value?” We believe there’s true economic value in every user in a corporate data ecosystem, so pricing should reflect user adoption.
It is our hope that we’re able to prove to each of our users and their respective companies that there’s value in being part of the data.world data catalog deployment. End-user adoption is one of the key metrics we report on internally. In fact, half of our employee bonus is based on customer usage, so we are maniacally focused on customer success.
Grow at your own pace
Finally, you’ll notice our “Rapid Growth Guarantee.” We don’t believe you should be taxed for being data-driven. If adoption happens faster than expected—whether that is in user count, use cases deployed, data-source connections, or additional catalog capabilities required—changing your plan is simple. There’s no penalty for changing tiers. At any time during the contract, you can upgrade and move up to a plan that aligns with your needs.
We recognize the complexity and diversity of modern data architectures create challenges for everyone from data stewards and data engineers to data scientists and chief data officers. That’s why it’s so important to provide a platform that makes data more meaningful, accessible, and usable, with a pricing plan that’s understandable, transparent, and flexible for your unique environment.
This is what we do for our customers.
