Hello @Max Harper 

The automated upgrade from Consultant to Business is not available (as Consultant accounts are multi-workspace accounts and Business one-workspace). Also, as of now Business plan is available starting from 5 seats (licenses). If you wish to proceed with changing your subscription to Business, please ask the Support team to help you out manually via the Submit a request form.

Hope this helps!

Ksenia, PM @ Miro

@Xenia
That sounds confusing.  … its not your fault… not the way you’ve phrased it or anything… its just part of the whole account/team/user/workspace/team/project/guest/boards/plan/features/editor/owner/permissions/  confusing challenge of Miro. 

Wait, what even is a workspace? 
Is that a ‘team’? 

Does an upgrade from Consultant to Business mean that one must collapse their multiple workspaces down into one?  

Yes @Max Harper I know exactly what you mean.. Sorry that it is confusing. 

Exactly that: we do not support auto-convert from Consultant as it may have multiple teams inside.

Does an upgrade from Consultant to Business mean that one must collapse their multiple workspaces down into one?  

Also @Max Harper just for the sake of clarity: Unlimited Guests and Smart Meetings are available for Consultant plan holders (only Diagramming is not for now).

@Xenia 

That would add clarity - but the pricing and plan page says differently. 
 

but you’re right… the interface is locking many of those diagramming stencils from us on a consultant plan  

Just so I understand — for full feature parity with what most of us as consultants actually wanted — sophisticated diagramming AND multiple workspaces to isolate our clients — we actually need to upgrade from Consultant to ENTERPRISE.

Now I suspect that it varies for each of us as to how much of our costs for Miro we can push to our clients (teams/workspaces in Miro parlance), but I think that more honesty from Miro support and pricing would be better. Moving from Consultant to Business is a step down because the entire reason Consultant was created in the first place was to allow centralized management of multiple teams. This was clear in the emails sent when RealTimeBoard first created the Consultant concept.

I agree that it seems honestly petty to deny access to the additional stencils when these plans are reaching into thousands/year. However, I think much of the angst could be avoided if the comparison was what it was really … Consultant > Enterprise.

As this should be an automatic move, those of us with Consultant plans should be able to be automatically priced to convert our existing configurations into Enterprise so we can at least understand our costs and make an informed decision.

For my organization, we are contractually (and legally) obligated to isolate data from clients we work with. Combining teams is absolutely not an option, so my only recourse at the moment is to follow suit with @Max Harper and look into Lucid or go back to importing diagrams from OmniGraffle and Visio. And as many point out, there are plenty of readily accessible icon palettes out there which mean we can keep working.

But I would like to stick with Miro if possible. My clients definitely like it and as many have mentioned here, I’ve had many of them sign up for their own business accounts as a result of my evangelizing the platform.

Fingers crossed that cooler heads will prevail soon.

In the meantime, I’m back to OmniGraffle …

@Ryan Quick

This is either:

- a not thought out accident

- a poorly thought out feature exclusion for Consultant Plan holders. Designed haphazardly with the intention to get people to upgrade? But upgrade to what plan? There is no upgrade pathway to unlock these features.  Like… Just let me pay more!! Can I please just pay you more Miro? Their answer right now is ‘no… not without loosing your other key features… or Enterprise @ price ‘come talk to us’.
 

The answer right now is — ‘we didn’t really plan this one out/ we somehow either missed that diagram tools would be useful to consultants… or caught it, but ignored it intentionally for no purpose’. 

To Miro’s credit, they are managing a lot of complexity and a lot of growth, so I can understanding them not having a perfect plan here… but it moments like this where we should point out the overall UX of the “product” for them … to that end: 

The result of this seemingly haphazard decision just feels unintentionally sloppy or intentionally antagonistic. 

Who did user-centered-design on this one? 

@Max Harper I’m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I can’t imagine though that this is merely the work of UX without proper research. There definitely is a “standard line” everyone is receiving which is that the functionality for diagramming is being deliberately moved into the other plans.

While I also agree that this is a bad move, and absolutely a horrible user experience. I, like you I suspect, dutifully clicked on the “you must upgrade now to continue using these products” email and found like everyone else that there is no way to follow the instructions in the email. THAT is bad UI/UX …

The fact that the product usage wasn’t actually aligned with the product offerings is the work of the Product and Feature management organizations or else someone would have immediately “corrected” the problem. All I think we can do in the meantime (as they’ve already had a month+ to fix it) is to continue to make the point that we are an advanced, paying community which was intentionally created by Miro for the purposes outlined. We joined the Consultant program precisely for the features it offered which uniquely fit our businesses. 

That we are now in this position leaves me with only two rationales I can think of:

1. The Consultant program is too costly/not-profitable enough for Miro to continue maintaining it and so the original offering is seen internally as a mistake, but as all of these folks are well-paying customers with a track record of converting additional customers we need to make some sort of gesture to keep them. The “gesture” was a move to Business plan, but no one realized that the reason we weren’t already Business customers was because the two small differences in the plan actually made ALL the difference for our business models.
2. The technical difficulty of maintaining centralized management of “workspaces” requires more aspects of the Enterprise plan (which centers mostly on authentication, authorization, privacy, and data management) than originally conceived and so the Consultants are actually receiving a fair amount of those services in a “scaled-down” manner than they actually advertise. Meaning Miro provides a lot of those enterprise-features but don’t give the Consultant administrators the ability to “tweak the knobs” like they would with the Enterprise Plan. This management of the Consultant concept is costly from both a backend development and a UI/UX perspective and so they would rather convert those customers to some other plan which doesn’t require this odd “crossover” behavior which is difficult to maintain internally. If this is the case, then the right path should be an “Enterprise-lite” or “Enterprise Consultant” plan which basically allows for more managed workspaces but limits the team members. This plan could be priced automatically as the other offerings are — and this is what I propose.

Sorry for being long winded — I am hoping that some internal Product, Feature, and/or technical folks inside Miro are paying attention. As I said before — we’re good customers and we want to work with Miro for the services it offers well … but a blanket move to “Business” is not the right one and seems to border on disdain for the Consultant customer base. 

Miro can do better. I’m hoping they choose to do so.