Everyone's raving about Fellow as the Google Docs killer for meetings. We just forced 150 people onto it. Here’s what they don’t put in the sales deck.
The migration was sold as "seamless." Spoiler: it wasn't. The import tool choked on complex Docs formatting. We lost comments, version histories were flattened, and hyperlinks became a mess. The promise of a "single source of truth" meant manually rebuilding half our templates.
Adoption is the real metric. After two months, active usage is maybe 40%. People default back to Docs for actual collaboration because Fellow's real-time editing still feels clunky. The mobile app is a joke for anything more than viewing.
The pricing looks fine until you realize you're paying per user for a glorified agenda tool. For 150 seats, that's a hefty annual invoice for a product most of my team actively avoids. Vendor lock-in is already setting in with all our processes now tied to their ecosystem.
So, we have a "centralized" system half the company ignores, and a bill that makes our CFO wince. Success?
Your favorite tool is probably overpriced.
Ouch, that's a rough rollout, and I appreciate you sharing the real post-migration metrics. The adoption cliff is the story here - a 40% active usage rate after two months is a flashing red light that the tool isn't fitting the actual workflows.
Your point about real-time collaboration feeling clunky compared to Docs rings true. Even if a tool centralizes agendas, if it creates friction during the meeting itself, people will silently revolt and use what's familiar. That's a product maturity gap that's hard to overcome with internal cheerleading.
Have you been able to get any qualitative feedback on *why* they're reverting to Docs? Is it purely the editing experience, or are they missing specific collaborative features? Sometimes that unlock can help you salvage value or build a stronger case for a different path forward. That invoice definitely hurts more when the tool is collecting dust.
Let's keep it real.
That 40% adoption figure is the quiet part they never say out loud. You've just funded a migration to a ghost town.
The lock-in you mentioned is the real kicker. Even if you pull the plug now, you've burned the migration energy and institutional goodwill. Your team won't trust the next "seamless" transition.
So you're paying for the privilege of having two broken systems, Docs and Fellow, instead of one working one. Classic.
Your vendor is not your friend.
Spot on about the "ghost town" effect. We saw the same pattern after switching our runbook templates to a dedicated platform. That post-migration energy drain is real - teams will just stop creating new content in the new tool if it's a chore.
You've hit the real cost: > burned the migration energy and institutional goodwill. It can take a year or more to rebuild that capital for the next platform change. In the meantime, you're stuck with that fractured workflow, exactly like you said.
K8s enthusiast
Oof, that migration pain is so real. Your point about the import tool failing on complex formatting reminds me of rolling out a new config management tool that couldn't parse our legacy YAML indentation. The promised "zero-downtime migration" turned into a weekend of manual reconciliation.
> paying per user for a glorified agenda tool
That's the killer. It sounds like you bought a platform for its promised CI/CD pipeline features, but in reality you're just using it to run `kubectl get pods`. The ROI math completely falls apart.
Did anyone push back on making the entire team's process dependent on Fellow's API before proving the core editing experience was actually better than Docs? Once that vendor lock-in sets in, extracting yourself is like untangling a full namespace of tangled network policies.
YAML is not a programming language, but I treat it like one.
Yikes, that's brutal. I'm new to this whole SaaS ops stuff, so maybe this is a dumb question, but how did you even measure that 40% active usage? Is that just a login stat from the admin panel, or are you tracking something like actual agenda creation?
Thanks!
Yeah, measuring that 40% is a good point. I'd bet the admin dashboard shows "active users" as anyone who just opens the app, not someone who creates or edits anything. That's a trap with a lot of these tools.
Our team is looking at new monitoring dashboards, and I'm already worried we'll fall for the same thing - a high login rate but zero useful engagement.
How do you actually track if a tool is being used for its core job, not just logged into?