Tobias Geisler

Jan 11, 2025

I can't trust ClickUp as an SMB owner

For me the worst part: ClickUp has a history of unethical business practices, trying to push the workspace owners to pay more and more. Their latest move: They've quietly moved some guest members in our (and everyone else's; check Reddit) workspace to a new paid seat role "limited member". ClickUp now has an algorithm in place that decides who is allowed to be a guest and who isn't. While we were informed that there is now a new member role available for selection, there was no notification about automatically moving our workspace guests to a paid tier and we certainly did not consent to this. They even moved an account we purely use for testing to a paid tier. There is no way to move back the automatically converted internal guests to the member role. How is this legal? Our first issue with them a while back: We were an early adopter and we got a good deal and lifetime discount on our seats. Which we were very grateful for and I thought - wow, maybe this company will actually be great to work with - they seem to care about early adopters and I hoped they would be mindful of their early-adopter community. Well, I was wrong. Less than a year later, they just introduced a new plan (business plus) with some very useful and partially critical features. And while our discount deal was stated to apply to any plan they just claimed that this was a misunderstanding and our discount does not apply to new plans. In the end I just had to give up. Trying to get what was promised to us was just too time-consuming. I just can't trust ClickUp. I would love to be able to love ClickUp. But how can you trust someone who keeps cheating on you and doesn't change their behavior? Unfortunately, for us it's not feasible to move away at the moment. But if you're looking at this, it's not too late for you, and there might be better options out there for you. Let's see what hidden or open price increase strategy they'll come up with next. (To be fair, I want to mention that at least on the existing plan they've stuck to their promise of grandfathered pricing per seat - so far.) As soon as you've moved to the platform it's hard to move away. In business terms they're bulding a big moat and try to use this to squeeze as much money out of their SMB customers, hiding behind empty phrases such as "industry standard" and "enhancing productivity and collaboration". Honestly, I feel bad for ClickUp's support staff, having to justify bs company policies over and over again. I wouldn't last a day in this job. Basically, by committing to ClickUp, you're committing to untrustworthy behavior and cost increases year after year.