Swimm is a knowledge management and documentation tool for code, built to help developers navigate new codebases, onboard new hires, or share knowledge among engineering teams … and they just became product of the week on Producthunt. 🎉
The Challenge
Swimm’s pricing at that point was very simple. “We only had one tier charging by seats and the number of codebases a user can document.”, Itai Katz, Principal Software Engineer at Swimm, remembers.
As the product was growing, the team started talking about updating their pricing to offer more tiers and to improve their packaging. “There was a whole discussion with Sales and Product about how to add more paywalled features. We realized we first need to better understand how users engage with our features.”
The Solution
With Stigg, Swimm has launched a 3-tier pricing with a Free plan to better meet their diverse buyer needs. “When we got to Stigg, we already understood the implications of ‘just adding a tier’.”, Itai said. “We saw the amount of time it will take for us to build something that will allow us to manage features and add and gate new ones, and that is scalable. And it’s not just the time. It’s also the focus of the team that would be taken off of the core of our product. I saw Stigg and thought ‘Why would we even consider building something like this.’”
"It’s not just time. It’s also the focus of the team that would be taken off of the core of our product. I saw Stigg and thought ‘Why would we even consider building something like this.’"
The team now has a flexible pricing & packaging infrastructure out-of-the-box that
- allows engineering to add and update their pricing end-to-end
- provides multiple departments with usage data and gives Swimm the ability to run experiments to continuously improve packaging for their users
- enables Sales and Customer Success teams to quickly provide service to their customers, like extending trials or granting promotional feature access
- centralizes everything connected to pricing to communicate the same across the product, the website, and the billing, and to streamline pricing changes
Using Stigg, Swimm’s engineering team has since introduced a full trial experience. “The whole process with Stigg was so much easier for us. Managing the state of the trial, making sure someone who already started the trial won’t be offered one again, testing and covering all edge cases, … We were able to launch a trial in a few weeks instead of months of development.”
Stigg also reduced friction between development and sales. “It’s the context switch. You’re working on something and suddenly Sales signs a new customer or needs to support a request right now. It’s critical for the business, so you need to make those things happen. It’s a lot of pressure. It interrupts everything. And it often happens outside of business hours, because it’s a different time zone or the weekend.” With Stigg’s platform, Sales and CS can now easily and instantly extend trials or grant promotional feature access, without engineering support.
The Results
Without Stigg, Swimm would have built a much leaner solution. “Probably we would have needed one developer full-time for about a month to support tracking usage of one selected feature, and about another half a month to add a paywall to that feature. Double that, if we were to support more features.” Itai estimates.
“Probably we would have needed one developer full-time for about a month to support tracking usage of one selected feature, and about another half a month to add a paywall to that feature. Double that, if we were to support more features.”
On top of that, the team saves several developer hours every month to support Sales requests such as contracts signed outside of Swimm’s self-service flows, trial extensions, and VIP access to features outside of a specific plan. Stigg’s platform allows no-code teams to support customers much faster, reducing friction between developers and Sales.
And it’s not just the developer hours saved for Swimm. “Stigg gives us the confidence to be ready for any requirement we may need to support in the future, like building more plans, adding new features, sunsetting features, supporting experiments, etc. Stigg allowed us to offload a lot of the pricing pressure and focus on our core product again.”
