Spinal November update: mdx components support is here (and a sneak peek into new plans and pricing)

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Welcome to yet another monthly product update. I’m always a bit surprised to see the notification to write this email: again a month went by?! 🏎️💨 Last month saw an uptick in switches to annual pricing and that continued onto the following month. I’m truly happy with every customer, but the trust of annual subscribers always puts an even bigger smile on my face. 😊

If you want to save money (and get a high-five from your account): you get two months for free when you pay annual for Spinal. 🤑 I am also previewing some new plans and pricing below. 🤫

With that out of the way. Let’s go over some of the new stuff in Spinal!

🎼 MDX components #

If you have no idea what MDX components are, you can skip this section and save 25 seconds of your time. 😆

Happy to announce that the first iteration of MDX components have landed in Spinal. It was easily the most requested feature the past few months, so even if it’s not yet feature-complete, I pushed the big, red deploy button. The following weeks you will be able to add new components from the editor and also nested components is on the list!

📨 Invite your team by email #

From early on you could invite your team to Spinal by sharing a link with them. This has both up- and downsides. For starters, for Spinal, it was the quickest way to implement and, for customers, easy to share one link in a team chat. But the downside was one link hold all authorisation access (roles and Content Type access). Also if you forgot to disable an invite-link; it is a security risk (improvements on this front are in the making).

So last week email invites were introduced. Next to the link invite, you can now invite your team, one by one, to Spinal. And each invite can have different authorisation options. So one could be an admin (and have access to all) and others only write and publish access.

Other Nebulous Notables 👩‍🚀 #

🖼️ image uploads in your Content settings now show a preview

☁️ Cloudinary support is being phased out; only direct uploads to GitHub will be supported from 1 February 2024

🏓 tables are now supported in the editor (not all markdown parsers support tables, so check your SSG docs)

🐞 had issues with your site’s settings being reset? Not anymore! A real obscure bug was fixed to help with this.

✍️ Looking for a Freelance SaaS writer? #

Or know a great one (add them!)? I started SaaS Writer Hub to help Spinal customers (and others) find great freelance writers for their SaaS’ marketing site. It’s a tiny side-project, but hope it can help ease your process without going through tedious market places. More filter/search options coming!

👀 ICYMI: Previously released features #

Some features that were released the previous months:

• Weekly and monthly overview emails. See all your published content from the previous period. Enable from your Profile settings.
• Workflow: a kanban-like board to progress your content in stages. Read about it in the docs.

💰 About plans & pricing #

I often get asked about Spinal’s pricing. The $29 plan is réally high value: unlimited team members, unlimited content, powerful editor (that transforms content to markdown), schedule content, calendar view, grouping content, kanban board and so on. How is that possible? 🤯

And yes, every now and then, I also get an email from someone who thinks I’m ripping them off (“why pay if there are OSS options!!1!”). 😬 It’s especially after thóse email I’m considering to change pricing. To increase it!

So I’d like to give a sneak peek to what’s coming in 2024. 🤫

Currently really cool features are being worked on that will be released in early 2024. Once that’s done, the Team plan’s monthly price will increase from $29 to $39. Don’t worry: current customers won’t be affected (I’m truly happy with your early support!). 😎

Then following that: Spinal will get additional plans, called: Power Ups. These will be additional packages of features that will help you improve your content or get more out of it or… well, I’ll dive into those details when release will be near. 🕵️

That’s the vision I’ve laid out to continue Spinal being a great option for small, but growing SaaS companies while keeping it sustainable in the long run. And am excited to see it slowly coming to live. ☺️

Seen great examples of “addons” being used in yours or other SaaS products? Happy to chat!

And that’s it for this time around. There will be one more monthly update in 2023. See you then! ✌️

—Eelco, founder Spinal