Why we’re standardizing our terms and conditions
Early this year, we embarked on a mission to remove friction in the B2B SaaS customer buying experience by making all of our plans available online and our pricing transparent. You can now purchase Mixpanel in the same add-to-cart way as almost anything else you shop for online.
Today, we’re going one step further and addressing another pain point for customers: the tedious process of negotiating legal terms and conditions, or terms of use. Negotiating “Ts & Cs,” as they’re known in the procurement world, can sometimes take as much time as researching the product, signing up to try it, and deciding to purchase it. And you could argue there’s a good reason for that: Terms and conditions describe the obligations and responsibilities of each party and, oftentimes, there’s liability associated if a party were to breach them.
At Mixpanel, one of our core values is Customer Focus. That’s why we’ve put in the extra work to make our Ts & Cs contracting process easier for customers who purchase one of our online plans by giving them all the same legal terms and conditions. At the same time, we’re bolstering our obligations to customers to ensure they are comfortable operating under our agreement terms. This should streamline reviews of our Ts & Cs and expedite the purchase process!
How is this good for customers?
First, it lets everyone benefit from the same terms and conditions. This effort is intended to expedite procurement/legal reviews and eliminate the inefficiencies that exist in current negotiation cycles. For some businesses, the procurement/legal review alone can take weeks or months to get through. That’s an insane amount of time to wait out when teams are eager to start using new services and products. We believe that if the terms and conditions are fair and meet or exceed what is deemed to be industry standard, they should be acceptable to our customers.
What’s so special about our terms and conditions?
We’ve contracted with thousands of customers with lawyers who have combed through the details of different custom terms and conditions we’ve offered. From that experience, we’ve been able to develop really strong standard terms that are as customer-friendly as we can get without being irresponsible to our own viability. We view this as the most responsible way to protect our customers’ interests. Our customers also depend on our ability to serve them for the long haul.
Wait, but does it work for big companies?
Yes! Over 600 of our customers are enterprise companies (with greater than 500 employees). We have Fortune 1000 companies using Mixpanel, and we serve some of the biggest brands you use every day. Our standard terms and conditions are being offered to the vast majority of our customers. If you have questions or concerns about our Ts and Cs, we are always looking for feedback, so please reach out.
For subscription plans larger than what can be purchased online, please work with your Mixpanel Account Executive to address any customized terms and conditions requests.
What do I tell my lawyer?
Tell them they won’t need to bill you too much (or at all) for a SaaS contract with Mixpanel. Anyone who wants to read the details of our new terms can do so—relatively quickly—right here.
You can also find a detailed breakdown of the great value we’re bringing to our customers with our new Ts & Cs in this additional explainer blog by our legal team.
I promised to have more fun news to share when we launched price transparency at the beginning of the year. This is just another step toward customer delight for us, and stay tuned for more!