The million user count information refers to FileMaker's user base (Not CC's market reception) and is somewhat dated as it has been around, for sure since FileMaker 17, along with mobile downloads, developer & partner count. Those stats have been Claris' selling points for a while now.
I'm ok with Claris disclosing some information only behind closed doors.
I'm less ok with us giving statements on how well the product is received before Claris has even made a public statement on this.
Personally, given a March launch, I was not expecting any info updates until Engage.
@Mark is curious about the context and motivation leading to both the introduction of new pricing tiers and previous limitations to be lessened or waived.
No one questions that it was a move in the right direction. That said, Claris chooses not to be releasing information about that, leaving people in the community to draw their own conclusions. They could have a blog post giving some details about that, they could have information about new features (like the recently introduced possibility to be looping inside a flow) or components, but that is not the case.
They listened: Yes and no. They had access to partners before releasing the product. Was feedback only gathered about the feature set and experience, or also about pricing plans and related limitations?
Again, no one will say "push the price back up, bring back the app limits".
When you alter your pricing table 2 months after launch without communicating the motivation, context and intent, you make it look like you made a mistake. You don't need to be a marketing guru to understand that. Claris could communicate about this to clarify (“Claris stems from the Latin root ‘clarus,’ which means ‘clear, bright and shining,’” source) but they choose not to or are too busy with other elements (upcoming release of other products, virtualizing Engage, ...).
Now about the slow roll-out part, I need to be sold this a bit more:
- From my perspective, they acquired Stamplay, a 5-year-old baby (if not older). They should already have some data on how their infrastructure can handle the volume.
- Saying the price is higher to limit adoption in order to preserve the infrastructure equates to saying that later on, once everything is tuned, the price is likely to go down. Time will tell if that is the case I guess.
- Getting crazy adoption on launch is actually harder to achieve than it sounds, even if the product was free. Getting people to know your product is both costly and time-consuming.
For sure, it is easier to lower the price than to make it higher, but I think the game here works a bit differently:
- people will look into iPaaS solutions to integrate their different platforms
- once their setup / configuration will be done they are less likely to want to change providers because setup and configuration is the costly part
- by introducing additional connectors, Claris could explain a price increase
Anyway, like you said @jormond, it's their product, and they can choose how they want to handle this.
I'm not fighting, I'll be happy to implement things if I propose this to a customer, and they are thrilled to use it as it can be game changing for some. It has value, that I am not challenging.