Domo Consumption Model: Unlock the Full Potential of Domo with Usage-Based Pricing

If you are an existing Domo customer, you likely have heard the term “Consumption Model” from your Domo sales rep. If you aren’t a Domo customer yet, we’d love to talk to you about the consumption model and how your business can benefit from Domo.

Either way, it’s important to understand what the Domo consumption model is –  and useful to hear it from a knowledgeable third party. In this blog, we’ll dive into what the consumption model is, how it is different from previous Domo pricing model, and what it means for your organization if you are already a Domo customer.

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1. What is the Domo Consumption Model?

There are many ways to price a Software as a Service (SaaS) product. Monthly fee, yearly fee, user based, usage based, company size, available discounts and more. Domo’s consumption model bases the price off how much your organization uses Domo, a method many software companies are migrating too these days.

They calculate how much you use the platform by how much the data center is moving data around: bringing it into Domo, transforming it, and pushing it out of Domo. As a pricing structure, this makes sense, since Domo pays its host server, AWS, based on data storage and compute power. So, Domo can more easily forecast margins, profit, and revenue if they price Domo in a similar structure.

2. How is it different from previous contract structure?

If you are already a Domo customer and not on the consumption model, Domo will want to ultimately update your contract to this structure, either at your next renewal or sooner. During the conversations with Domo, its critical to understand how the consumption model is different than your current contract.

Legacy Domo contracts are mostly based on number of users, number of connectors, and number of data rows stored. The smallest Domo contract was typically 5 users, 5 connectors, and about 1 million rows of data. As you increased users, connectors, and data rows, the price per each scaled as well. Basic Domo contracts got you just the basic Domo platform of connecting data, transforms in MagicETL or SQL, and cards and dashboards for front end reporting.

Additional features such as apps, write back connectors, graph data science tools, Domo Everywhere, and more, were an additional cost; either added on mid contract or baked into your original price. Depending on your contract size and when you signed on, you may have negotiated a discount on some portion of your contract.

Domo consumption model contracts are based on a credit system. In your contract, you purchase a number of Domo credits, good for a year. As your business uses Domo, certain actions in Domo are charged a credit or two. The items in Domo that utilize credits are pulling data into Domo, transforming data, storing data, and pushing data out of Domo.

To estimate how many credits your business will use, Domo uses a calculator that takes in the following factors.

• Number of raw data tables pulled in
• The frequency data tables will be updated (Hourly, Daily, Monthly, etc.)
• How much transformation the data needs (Low, Average, High)
• The hours during the day the data is “live” (During working hours, 24 hours a day, etc.)
• If data will update on weekends or just during the week
• The approximate rows of data storage (in millions).

The calculator outputs an estimated credits used per year. As the number of credits purchased increase, your cost per credit decreases.

With the consumption model, the great thing is, it is very easy to start with a certain number of credits, and as your company utilizes Domo, you get a better understanding of how and where your credits are being used, and you can adjust your contract with Domo later on if needed.

One great aspect of this Domo pricing structure is that the entire platform is unlocked. There is no additional cost for apps, data science, Domo Everywhere, and more. Since all features are unlocked, you are able to try out all different tools in Domo for different solutions and workflows in your business, without worrying about pricing negotiations.

When moving to the Domo consumption model, it could seem like you are paying more for the same amount. However, with all features of the platform available, you are really getting much more. You will want to spend some time with your major domo, or a consulting partner, looking at Domo tools such as embed, workflows, APIs, app studio, data science, writebacks, etc. that your company could utilize to get even more value from the platform.

Two other great aspects of this pricing structure are that the number of users and number of end reports are not a factor in your price. All customers have unlimited users and unlimited dashboards and reports – a huge advantage for many companies.

Check out our article for tips on optimizing Domo credit usage with the medallion model. 

3. What migrating to consumption model means for your organization

When moving to the consumption model, companies often don’t know where to start. Initially, it is hard to picture what organizational changes you need to make to get the most from Domo. A consulting partner can be a great resource to walk you through this process.

To start, since the Domo consumption model is usage based, you’ll likely need to restructure part of how your data is being processed in Domo. No longer limited by the number of connectors you use, a great first question is “Are there other data sources we can bring into Domo?” With both new data connection and existing ones, you’ll want to optimize how they are connected, bringing in as many tables as you need, but not many more than you need.

When transforming the data, it is important to have clean database structure hygiene. You’ll want to ensure your end reporting tables are as broad as possible, to power many reports with filtering on the card level; instead of having many filtered tables that are similar, each powering a few reports.

Though data row storage is not a large use of credits in the consumption model, it is something to keep in mind. When possible, using Views is beneficial, since storing data in views consumes less credits than materialized datasets.

Lastly, a main consumer of credits is how often dataflows run to update data. Businesses should optimize the dataflow workflow schedule to update data as often as the data changes, but not more frequently than is necessary.

Conclusion

The Domo consumption model allows companies to get the full value of the Domo platform, with less barriers. With a shift in mindset to how your company approaches Domo, you can achieve maximum value from your Domo spend.

Partnering with Domo Consultant at Graphable can help your company optimize your credit usage right from the start, and ensure your users are educated on how to get the most from Domo.