Hi Brendon (3PedalMINI), Kirk here with Portal (founder and CEO for those I haven't met), thanks for getting a conversation going. It a bummer to read, I hate when any of our loyal users are unhappy, but perhaps I can shed some light on our decision and answer any questions directly.

For those who haven't seen our announcement, you can read it here:
[Link: help.portal.io]

We really didn't want to start charging, but it's something we've been wrestling with for the past year and decided we had to do in order to remain sustainable. Many of you remember that we were never a proposal tool. We started out as a catalog and purchase order tool and then we added on the proposal tool because you all asked for it. We started seeing growth in our "proposal only" users and we've been tracking it closely because, as stated here, those users are a cost center for us. Our primary business model is the same as Expedia, we get paid a small commission % when we deliver orders to certain suppliers. We were fine subsidizing the cost of proposal-only users because we expected that many of them would start ordering from us. That did happen, in fact close to 80% of you DO place more than $5k in orders every month. So you might say, why not just continue to subsidize the small 20% group then? The answer to that has been, "absolutely", for the past 5 years, but now that small 20% represents over 500 companies!!! That's a problem because we refuse to lower our quality of service and running this company requires way more people than you might think. We have over 25 full-time staff to make it all work properly. We are a data aggregation company (think BlueDog or other services) we are a proposal company and we are running a marketplace. Many companies claim that they care about their customers but it rarely feels that way. I know that if I ask any of you who have interacted with us over the years, you will tell me that you have had a great experience with our staff. "Care" is something we've built our entire culture around. How many other software companies can you say that about? Go ahead, send a message to one this afternoon and ask a random question, then try the same with us. You can get a human on the phone anytime at Portal. We care deeply about our users, which is THE reason we are charging. We want to keep it going and we refuse to lower our standard of service. This new $49 fee is merely a subsidy, it doesn't generate any profit for us.

One other update from today... Many of you running smaller companies brought up the concern around sporadic ordering. Some months you place lots of orders and other months maybe none. We listened to that and updated our program earlier today. If you don't hit the $5k PO threshold in a month, we will look back over your last three months and see if you exceeded $15k in aggregate. If so you'll get proposals for free. Believe it or not, we don't want you to have to pay!

-Kirk
Founder & CEO
Portal.io