Why DocumentSynth is month to month

A plan is a capability level, not a commitment level

Basic, Professional and Enterprise describe what the platform will do for an organization and at what scale: how many people, how many controlled documents, how much storage, which governance capabilities. They do not describe how long anybody has agreed to stay.

Those two things are usually bundled together, and bundling them makes the choice harder than it needs to be. Deciding what you need this quarter is a question you can answer. Deciding what you will need in three years, before you have used the product at all, is mostly guesswork with a signature on it.

The decision this removes risk from

A controlled-document system becomes the system of record for the documents a quality system depends on. That is not a tool somebody adopts casually, and the caution is entirely rational: the cost of choosing wrong is not the license fee, it is the migration, the revalidation and the disruption to a function that cannot afford much.

Removing the contract does not remove that risk, and it would be dishonest to suggest it does. What it removes is the part of the risk that comes from the commercial arrangement rather than from the software — the part where an organization has concluded a product is wrong for it and is still paying for it eighteen months later.

What this asks of us

It means the renewal would be a decision an organization makes repeatedly rather than once. If the product stops being worth what it costs, we find that out quickly and directly, which is a better feedback mechanism than a churn number at the end of a term.

We would rather earn the next month than hold anybody to a year they regret. That is not generosity; it is the arrangement we intend to be judged on monthly, and it points our incentives at whether the product is still worth what it costs.

Changing direction as you grow

Organizations change shape. A team of four running its first procedures under control is not the same organization two years later with three sites, an identity provider and a partner network — and the plan that suited the first is not the one that suits the second.

Your needs change. The platform holding your controlled documents should be able to change with them, without the change being a negotiation.

What is not settled yet

DocumentSynth is being prepared for availability, and pricing has not been published. The plan limits described on the site are provisional and may change before general availability; nothing there is an offer. What is settled is the shape: capability levels, billed monthly, with no annual commitment required.