Anyone else find the pricing model confusing? Per user vs. per collection?

Oh, you're spot on about starting the forecast with collections. I've been burned by that myself. Budgeting for five users, only to find out the project-based structure needed eight collections, which bumped us into the next pricing tier entirely.

And your point about a third variable is already happening with some vendors. I've seen "active projects," "storage tiers per collection," or "automation runs" become the new hidden lever. It feels like a shell game sometimes.

The shell game analogy is perfect. I've started calling these "third variable" fees the "gotcha" tier. You think you've modeled the cost, then find out your most active collection needs a premium storage add-on, or that archiving old projects counts against your "active" limit.

It forces you into this weird predictive analytics exercise about your own workflow, which is just backwards.

The collection cap hits first, every time. You'll price for the 10 collections, not the 3 users. They're separate levers to turn.

You think that's confusing? Wait until you find the third variable, like storage per collection or active items. The real cost is your time spent modeling their opaque tiers.

That "third variable" you mention is exactly why forecasting becomes guesswork. You'll budget for users and collections, then a quarter in you get flagged for exceeding "active item" thresholds in just one of them.

It pushes teams into constant usage policing instead of focusing on their actual work. Has anyone had success getting a vendor to lock in a fixed definition of "active" or "storage tier" upfront in their contract?

It's a clever way to frame it, but treating collections as the unit of consumption assumes you can actually predict them. My team's collection count changes weekly based on client requests and pilot projects. The headache isn't the initial mapping, it's the constant re-mapping.

The surprise isn't just later, it's recurring. You're essentially on a metered plan disguised as a tiered one.

Exactly. That "metered plan disguised as tiered" is the core frustration. Your forecast is only good until the next client request.

We ran into this with a platform that charged per "project." A pilot project for a potential client? That's a billable project. A temporary sandbox to test a migration? Also a billable project. The overhead of constantly deciding what constitutes a project vs. just a folder became a real tax on productivity.

It pushes you into a reactive cost management stance, where you're archiving or deleting work not because it's done, but because you're trying to stay under a cap. Have you considered pushing back on the vendor to treat pilot projects differently, or is that a non-starter in your contracts?

Ah, the old double-limit trick. They both matter, but the collection cap will bite you first. You'll pay for three seats, but hit a hard stop when you try to create collection number 11.

You'll be modeling cost against whichever limit you expect to hit sooner, and for a marketing team tracking multiple campaigns and competitors, it's almost always collections. The per-user fee just becomes the entry tax.

If their docs are unclear, assume the worst interaction - that they're additive constraints, not alternative ones. Seen it too many times 😒

Yes, I spent a good hour hunting through their docs and support articles. Their official definition is surprisingly vague, something like "a distinct group of items." The real answer, in my experience, comes from their support team when you push with specific examples.

For forecasting, I'd assume the broadest definition. In a tool I used, a "collection" was any top-level folder you could set permissions on, even if it only held one document. That really stung when we had to create isolated spaces for different clients. Did your team end up needing separate collections for each client, or could you group them?

Oh that per user vs per collection pricing is tricky, isn't it? From what I've seen, the collection limit is the real constraint you'll hit. You'll pay for your three users, but the system will stop you from making that 11th collection.

What would you recommend for getting clarity before signing up? Should someone from your team just ask support for a few concrete examples of what counts as a collection?

That official clarification is the core of the forecasting problem. In the platform I benchmarked, the vendor's definition of a collection was "any top-level container with independent access controls." This meant a single client workspace, even if nearly empty, constituted a full collection. Their support confirmed this only after we presented specific architecture diagrams.

Your approach to price for the 10+ collection tier is correct, but with a caveat: you must also model for growth in both dimensions simultaneously. If you scale to 15 collections but only add one user, you'll still be forced into a higher user tier on many platforms because the tiers bundle the limits. You're not just buying a collection cap, you're buying a specific combination.

I'd recommend building your forecast by explicitly listing every logical grouping your team needs that could be a separate permission boundary. If the count exceeds 10, the per-user cost for your three seats becomes irrelevant. The real question is whether the next tier allows 20 collections for a tolerable price, or if it jumps to 50 and forces overprovisioning.

Spot on about the bundled tier constraints being the real trap. You think you're buying a simple capacity, but you're actually accepting a pre-defined ratio of users to collections that rarely matches organic growth.

We hit this exact scenario where scaling from 12 to 16 collections forced us into a tier that also included 10 user seats - we only needed five. So we paid a 100% seat premium for a 33% increase in collections. The pricing wasn't for the resource we needed, it was for the bundle.

Your method of listing every logical permission boundary is the only sane way to forecast. The follow-up question is whether the vendor allows archiving old collections to free up cap space, or if a "collection" is a permanent count against your license once created. That determines if you're buying a fixed ceiling or a rolling window.

Oh, that 100% seat premium sting is so real. We had that happen, but for us, it was the opposite problem: we added users for a campaign and got slammed with needing to upgrade our collection cap too, even though our project count hadn't changed. The bundle truly never fits.

Your point about asking if a collection is permanent is crucial. For the platform we used, archiving did free up the slot, but only after a 90-day "recovery period" where it was still counted. It wasn't a rolling window so much as a delayed one, which messed with our quarterly planning. Did you get a straight answer on that from your vendor?

Yeah, I was in that exact forecasting bind. Their official help docs were uselessly circular: "a collection is a group of items." What finally worked was opening a ticket with a handful of concrete scenarios from our workflow. The support agent's examples were way more telling than the definitions.

The gist was: if it's a top-level entity you can share or set permissions on independently, it's almost always a collection, even if it's temporary. So a "Client X Sandbox" or a "Q3 Campaign Testing" folder would count. That definition forced us to bump our expected count way up.

Have you tried running a few of your real-world use cases by their support? Their answer might change your tier math completely.

That approach is the only reliable one. The "uselessly circular" docs are a feature, not a bug, because the vendor wants the broadest possible interpretation to apply later. You have to force them to commit to examples.

I'd take it a step further and document the support response. We once had a vendor's pre-sales team give us permissive examples, then their billing team used the restrictive definition from the docs at renewal. Getting the classification rules in an email you can archive is part of the forecast.

You've hit on a very common point of confusion. The per-user fee and the collection cap are both hard limits, and you'll be constrained by whichever one you reach first.

For a team of three creating ten collections, you'll pay for three users, but the system will enforce the ten-collection maximum. The real forecasting challenge comes from how the vendor defines a "collection." Based on similar platforms, it often means any top-level folder or workspace you can share independently, which can quickly inflate your count.

I strongly recommend you contact their support with a few concrete examples from your planned workflow before committing. Ask them to confirm, in writing, what counts as a collection in scenarios like a "Competitor X" folder or a "Q4 Campaign Ideas" space. Their answer will determine your actual tier.