I’ve been meaning to share my thoughts on this issue for a while now, although I have been restraining myself simply because I am a big enthusiast of the platform and only want to see it continue to skyrocket year after year. Monday.com has deeply impacted my career over the past four years, as I have worked both as a CSM at two partner companies here in LatAm and currently as a freelance implementer.
My intent with this post is not only to understand how many people have noticed but also how many are impacted by this “strategic” path taken by Monday, which seems to be a crude move to extract more money from customers and app providers.
To be plain-spoken: I am almost 100% certain that monday.com has been avoiding upgrading the product with critical features solely because some app already provides them, and there’s income coming from this partnership. At first glance, everything seems valid and like just an agreement between companies with the same interests.
The problem arises in practice when the end user is forced to pay more, in addition to the licenses for the entire organization, which is often immense, just so a timeline column can be automated based on two other date columns.
I must remind you that, when using an app, it always applies to the account as a whole. So if you have a team of five people who need this timeline functionality but the organization as a whole has 500 monday.com licenses, well… good luck convincing your cost center.
There used to be a native automation that automated the timeline column, which was completely removed, most likely to prioritize an app. In the end, the ones benefiting are monday.com and the provider, while you become dependent on a subscription within the monday.com subscription just to copy a value from a mirror column to a normal column.
The monday.com and Marketplace partnership itself is not a hurdle; there are many apps that do complex things like scalable subitem templates, specific integration recipes, applying a formula in an automation, etc. But when the most minimal capability, which could have been part of the platform’s native functionality long ago, is dependent on a monthly dollar amount per user, it gets frustrating, in my opinion.
About a week ago, I spotted a pop-up on my board while I was duplicating some items. It suggested, “Hey, we see you duplicate a lot of items, how about installing this app?” Do you mean there’s even tracking for user actions that could be very useful for workers who depend on those features, and Monday not only fails to make it available but also uses it to try to convince me to pay an app?
Monday has to address this. The best solution, in my point of view, is to evaluate and categorize requested features from low to high complexity and ensure that apps are delivering only the most complex and creative functions. That is, in order to align user needs with what the system can offer, combined with app provider solutions. After all, discovering that monday.com is aware of a simple need, like filling a dropdown column with an automation, but makes you pay monthly/yearly for it, is disheartening and disappointing.
At the end of the day, Monday’s products are designed for small and large organizations that need to solve tricky stuff and achieve their business goals, not for app creators to spend three days coding a way to Ctrl+Z mistakes on a board and make money from it.
Thanks for reading. I’d love if you, as an end user, let me know what you think about this!
