C-c-c-changes

Emma Rose

January 28, 2019 3 min read

I'm really excited about what we’ve got planned for this year. Last year we spent a lot of time talking to creative teams all over the world, learning about the collaboration challenges everyone is facing. In 2019, we’re channeling all that we’ve learned into a complete overhaul of the platform that we’ll be releasing later this year as Niice 3.

Along the way, we’ll be releasing a bunch of changes (big & small) that lay the groundwork for what’s to come. To start us off we have a new homepage (and a new home for search), a new pricing model, and new URLs for boards.

New homepage

In a few weeks, it’ll be 6 years since I launched Niice.co as a side project. Blimey.

In that time it’s grown from a side project into a small-but-mighty bootstrapped company; from a fun little ‘search engine with taste’ into a fully-fledged creative feedback platform used by brands like Playstation, Nike and Airbnb.

The goal has always been to help creatives do their best work, but over the years our approach has evolved from simply trying to give ideas, to helping them share and discuss those ideas with their clients and team (turns out that’s the part where most projects fall apart, and where we can help the most).

Over that time our homepage has stayed relatively the same; it’s all been about search. While we love search (and have big plans for it), having it as the homepage has resulted in most people thinking that’s all we do. So from today it’s going to live at Niice.co/search. It still works exactly as it did before, and you still don’t need an account to search, it just lives at a different URL.

New pricing

Since we launched our first paid plans in 2014, we’ve had a ‘per-user’ pricing model. Initially this seemed like a good fit, but as we’ve focused more on developing a platform for the whole team to discuss creative, we found ourselves fighting against our pricing model. Per user pricing means customers have to think hard about every additional person they add to the discussion, and forced us to hold back on features we knew would be useful. – like creating public boards clients could add content to without having to sign up – because they could be used to circumvent our business model.

Towards the end of last year we started testing a new ‘per workspace’ pricing model—$99/mo for a Pro workspace, no matter the number of users—and as we’d hoped it has led to teams getting much more value from the platform. Going forward, we’ll only be offering ‘Per workspace’ pricing.

P.S. If you’re an existing customer, you’re welcome to stick with your current pricing plan for as long as you like.

New URLs

Lastly (for now), we’ve been doing some spring cleaning on our URLs! It’s years since we realised boards could be used for a lot more than moodboarding, but every board link still included ‘/m/’ for ‘moodboard’. We’ve changed this to /boards/, so you can easily remove the permalink and get back to see all of your boards. We’ve got big plans for URLs this year (editable permalinks, custom domains, etc), but this is the first step.

Stay tuned…

Over the next few months we’ll be releasing a ton of updates that should make the platform a lot faster & easier to use. If you want a sneak peak at some of what’s coming, check out our forum (it’s also a great place to post feature requests and give us feedback on what we’re working on).

2019 is shaping up to be a big year for us, I can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on!