Doesn’t that title sound like the world’s easiest question? After all, the GoTo collaboration products (GoToMeeting at first, followed later by GoToWebinar) upended the web conferencing industry by boldly placing standardized “rack rate pricing” right up front on their website. Before that, enterprise customers mostly had to go through pricing negotiations with sales reps from WebEx or Placeware in a process that felt uncomfortably like buying a car. “Do you want undercoat protection with that webinar plan? Let me talk to my sales manager and see what I can do for you.”
The GoTo products were priced low for mass-market appeal, with transparent prices corresponding to different participant capacity tiers. It became a common pricing model that many other vendors have emulated ever since.
Given that history, I was bemused yesterday when I tried to provision a new GoToWebinar account for a client of mine. I started by visiting the public page on the LogMeIn website for GoToWebinar Plans and Prices.
Up at the top right you can see a slider switch that lets you view prices on a month-to-month, no contract basis or as a monthly equivalent based on an annual prepayment for a contracted 12-month license. LogMeIn gives you a discount for prepayment. That’s another incentive that has become standard in the industry. For this discussion, I’ll leave all prices shown at their default “Annual” setting.
We see that there are four plans listed, primarily distinguished by the participant capacity each allows. In my case, I told my client that the “Standard” plan at a 250-person capacity was optimal for their needs.
Now I could have simply clicked the “Buy” button on that plan and been done with it. But I can’t leave well enough alone. Instead, I came back later to the main GoToWebinar home page and tried to establish a new account from there.
If you go through the GoToWebinar home page, you see a blue button offering “Start for Free.” This lets you create a trial account that is good for 7 days. Fair enough. I created the trial account for my client.
Now I wanted to upgrade to the paid plan I had identified earlier. I clicked on the billing portion of my account page and chose “Subscribe Now” to purchase a plan. Here’s the option list I was presented with:
Huh? Three options instead of four, with different prices and different plan names! That’s certainly confusing.
Now my curiosity was piqued… I decided to check what happens if I try to change my plan type on an existing paid account. I logged in to my paid subscription plan, went to the billing section, and clicked to see plan options. I got the following list:
Whaddya know? Yet another plan name and price snuck into the list. Suddenly I see the option for the “Team” plan with 1000 participant capacity. And if I want to downgrade to the “Lite” plan listed on the main website (scroll back to the first picture), it doesn’t seem to be an option.
While we’re here, I might as well point out a fun sidetrack finding. I clicked on the button below the horizontal list to “COMPARE PLANS” and the screen changed to this helpful display:
Oops.
Now you know as much as I do. Depending on where you come into the online purchase process you may be able to license a Lite, Starter, Standard, Pro, Team, Plus, or Enterprise plan. Or you might not. Good luck with that.
