We’re rolling out a new pricing structure for Unsub, designed to be more fair to smaller institutions, and more streamlined for consortia.
New institution pricing
In the eight months since we released Unsub, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from folks concerned that our flat-rate pricing placed an unfair burden on smaller institutions. Big university libraries often manage budgets a hundred times larger than those of small college libraries; charging them both the same price feels inequitable to many.
We have come to agree–even before accounting for the fact that COVID seems poised to hit smaller colleges particularly hard. We want to build a fair, sustainable community around Unsub, and so we’re changing our flat-rate model to one where price is tied to institutional budgets.
Here’s the new pricing table:
In this model, Unsub is cutting prices for most institutions; well over half of our prospective users fall into the new $500 tier. The richest schools, on the other hand, will pay more–but still less than they’d pay for comparable tools (specifically, the 1figr data report, which was around $15,000 for large universities, before Elsevier bought and discontinued it).
And even at the highest tier, we believe Unsub offers an unbeatable value for users. As Science recently reported “[Unsub] is saving universities millions of dollars in journal subscriptions.” We think–and are hearing from users–that $3,000 is a bargain, given this upside.
Based on our best growth projections, this will be a roughly revenue-neutral change for us. That is, we don’t expect to make (or lose) much money on the new prices; cuts at the bottom will be offset by the increase at the top. Our goal is to distribute the support burden more equitably.
We put a lot of time into figuring out the correct pricing levels, and we had a lot of help. We’d like to thank the SPARC team, who provided helpful consulting, advice, and support. We’d also like to thank the folks who responded to our pricing survey, and the IPEDS database, all of which provided essential data. Of course we didn’t follow all of everyone’s advice, so we’ve erred, it’s our fault, not theirs!
The new prices will be effective immediately (4 August, 2020). If you are in the middle of getting the old price approved, that’s ok; just let us know and we’ll make an extension for you.
If you’re already a customer, your next renewal will be at your current price (or the new price, whichever is lower). After that, you’ll get bumped up to the standard pricing (if that’s relevant for you; again, most universities will see the price drop or stay the same). So for example, if you’re a library with a $3M materials budget, and you subscribed in June 2020: when you renew in June 2021, you’ll pay the same $1,000 you paid to sign up, but in June 2022 you’ll get bumped up to $3,000.
As before, if you’re truly unable to afford the tool, get in touch, and we’ll do our best to work something out. It’s important to us that Unsub stays sustainable, but it’s also important to us that the barrier to entry is as low as possible. Our number one priority is the mission.
New consortium pricing
Our old consortium price deal was that if you could get 10 or more institutions to sign up together, we’d give you 20% off.
This has turned out to be a bad fit for many consortia, because they want to do more of a rolling admissions system: they’ve got five institutions now, and expect another 20 to gradually sign up, one by one, over the course of the next year.
So, we’re modifying how the consortial discount works. It’s now a 10% discount, and there’s no minimum number of institutions needed to qualify. You just have to be getting Unsub through a consortium. Member institutions can sign up whenever they want, and we’ll bill the consortium right then (applying their 10% discount), and set up the new institution right away.
OK, that’s the news! We’re excited about these changes, because we think they’ll help us keep building the Unusb community in fair and sustainable ways. We really appreciate all the folks who gave us feedback. Keep it coming! We are learning a ton from our community and will keep making changes as we learn more and more.