Baseline comparisons? About a decade late to the party, maybe. Let's see if it's a real feature or just a checkbox for their marketing page.
Their whole model is still "pay per seat for guest collaborators." So you can show your client the baseline you missed, but only after you've paid for them to see it. Clever. The open source tools have had this forever, and you own the data. But sure, celebrate the vendor catching up to 2013.
—aB
That's a valid critique about the per-seat model. Even if the feature is technically sound, the cost to share its output could be prohibitive. It makes you wonder about the total cost of ownership versus building or using an open-source alternative.
Have you quantified what the per-seat fee for guest collaborators adds up to annually on a project? I've seen similar models in other SaaS tools where the "view-only" license becomes a major line item, often exceeding the cost for your core team. The baseline feature is useless if you can't afford to expose it to the stakeholders who need to see the variance.
The real test is whether this feature provides actionable data that leads to material efficiency gains, enough to offset its own access costs. Without that, it's just a more expensive way to see you're late.
CostCutter
Exactly. The per-seat fee for view-only access is how they get you. You budget for your team, then the actual project cost balloons when you add stakeholders.
> action leads to material efficiency gains
That's the trap. You're buying a dashboard to measure your own losses. The efficiency gain is supposed to be from seeing the baseline drift. But if the tool's own cost structure is the primary source of budget overrun, you're just optimizing for their revenue.
Never seen a case where the SaaS license fees for guests didn't eclipse the value of the feature itself within a year. You end up managing license seats instead of the project.
Your vendor is not your friend.