On late July, I got an email from Gather. It’s early in the morning, and the title make me jump from my bed. “Upcoming Pricing Changes from Gather”. I thought it’s just a pricing adjustment — although price adjustment can’t be counted as a “just”, at least for me — but it’s actually about Gather 2.0! I read the email and the FAQ, and wow, this will be a BIG update on Gather. If you are my clients, or just an occasional reader that using Gather, you need to read this. I’ll let you know what will be changed in this article.

In a glance, if you see their announcement, they seems to be overhauling the whole platform. They said that will rebuild it from the ground up with a modern, simplified UI, and powerful new features. I know that Gather already focusing on remote office space rather than on event space almost for like 2 years. But I don’t expect this big update coming in 2025! You must be curious on what will be changed on this update, let’s go to the next chapter!

No More Free Tier Plan

Yes, no more free tier plan after September 15th 2025. So if you are a free tier user, and you are happy for using Gather as your virtual space, better start subscribing so you won’t lose access to your space. For all my past clients, don’t worry! I still have all your map, even for someone who bought the service back on 2021. So if you need any space migration later, I’ll make sure to help you.

Actually removing the free tier plan is a bold move. I remember someone — I forgot is it a reviewer, or a businessman, or an investor — said this about Gather : “if Gather keep this business model, they will end up being Wikipedia instead of being a profitable business”. It’s a paraphrase, not exactly like that. But somehow I agreed with it. However it’s a business and they need to make a profit to be sustainable. I know we love Gather, and it’s so far the best virtual space platform that I ever met.

But no free tier? I think they can reduce the free tier to maybe 3 members only. Because 3 members could means they are just a small startup, and it’s good to give a sense of how it looks before subscribing. I don’t know whether they will provide a trial to the new Gather 2.0 or not. They are not saying it on their announcement explicitly. But I’ll make sure to make an update about this later.

Different Pricing Model

If you were a paid user previously, you might know that Gather subscriptions counted based from the concurrent user. So if you are expecting there will be 30 people on your space at the same time, you need to have a 30-user subscription. You don’t need to take care about who that 30 people are, you just need to make sure that there are no more than 30 people coming to your space at the same time. If you are a company with 2 shift, 30 people each shift, you only need to upgrade the capacity to be 30 not 60.

But in this new pricing model, the subscription is tied to the user. They call it member-based model. You paid for your team, not your guest, so the subscription is tied to who will be on your space. With the same case like above, if you are a company with 2 shift, 30 people each shift, you need to pay for 60 subscription now, not 30 anymore.

I’m still not quite sure whether they will have a way to switch the member in the middle of the subscription or not. Let say we have 1-year subscription, and we have A as our employee, after 4 months they are no longer with us, and we need to change to B. Do we need to add more subscription for adding B or we can move the 8 months subs of A to B. Again no explicit explanation about this, but I’ll make sure to update this later. Will it be positive or negative impact? Not sure yet, different case could give different result.

What About the Guest?

From the latest update of the announcement, they said that they will have a new system called monthly guest-hour. Every space have 30 hours base of guest-hour. So the guest could come to your space using the check-in system, and as long as it’s not more than 30 hours, it’s free, you don’t need to pay anything. Every 1 member additional subscription above 10 subscription, you will get 3 additional guest-hour. So if you have 20 member subs, you will have 60 guest-hour. The guest-hour will be reset every month.

They said there will be a dashboard showing how much hours left you have for the guest-hours. It’s still cool if you have a freelance employee, or occasional employee that doesn’t need to be always on the space. They could work outside Gather, and come to your space on Friday/Monday for weekly update. Actually this work well for my use case, I have some freelancers that doesn’t need to be on the space everyday, so I don’t need to pay the subscription for them because I have the guest-hour. But is it enough or not? I’m not sure yet. Because 30 hours monthly could mean if I have 10 guest in my meeting, and I need 4 meeting weekly, so we can only do the meeting for 45 minutes only each.

New Price! But ..

Yap, new price, surPRICE! The new pricing will be $15/user/month (monthly) or $12/user/month (annual). Yap that’s quite a significant price increase. Still cheaper than Zoom, still cheaper than having a real office building, of course. But they said there will be many new features incoming. The good news, you can keep using the old pricing if you make a subscription before September 15th 2025. But if you lock on the old price, you will be using Gather 1.0 not Gather 2.0. So no new feature for you. They said if you want to migrate, your unused portion of your current subscription will be counted as credit toward the new pricing system.

What if you don’t want to pay more? You will lose the access to your map. That’s crazy, but it’s fair. Don’t worry, I have some Gather alternative that you could see at the end of this article. I also open a mapmaking service for it by the way.

New Mapmaking System

Actually this one is my biggest concern. Since I’m a mapmaker, I need to know this as soon as possible. They said they will have new system called Gather Studio. Sounds cool, but they don’t say anything about that. All I know for now is just there will be a Simplified View, which will make the map to be like a wireframe, just in case someone feels the design is too overwhelming. Then there will be a direct map scaling from the Gather Studio, so no more static map like before.

The one that I worry most is Gather removing the access to add a custom map and custom object outside their environment. That will be affecting me directly to be honest, but hope we got the best of it. On my side, I’ll need to remove all the demo space like we used to have, because it depends a lot with the free tier plan. But that’s fine, I’ll change the demo system with something else with the same objective, but in a different way!

For now, I’m still in the middle of contacting the Gather team to show me how it will be different from the previous Mapmaker. It will be done around this week, hope all things will be good. I’ll be missing the Mapmaker so much, I was growing up with that interface hahaha.

Alternative to Gather Town

There are 2 platform that I know better as alternative to Gather Town, which is WorkAdventure and Zep. Each of it have different strength and weakness. I will give you my personal opinion about these 2 platforms.

WorkAdventure (WoA) is a French-based platform, so they now better about EU standart and stuff. WoA is quite great actually, they offer 15 concurrent user for their free tier plan. I work with this platform many time, as a Mapmaker. Their team is cool, even I made some conversation with their CEO, Greg, he is a cool and friendly guy!

The only downside is this platform is quite techy. The barrier to entry is quite big since you need to understand about Github and stuff, even for me. But I can help you if you want to migrate your map to WoA from Gather. They have their subscription price from $10/user/month, using concurrent system. Please take a look on them, who knows if they have more user, they will upgrade the platform to be way better.

Then Zep, it’s a South Korean-based platform. I also have some clients who use this platform before. But since it’s South Korean-based, there are many things that’s still in Korean language. I never met/communicate with their team before. Zep has 10 concurrent user for their free tier plan, and the subscription is start from $5/user/month, so far it’s the cheapest option. But the pricing is incremental with the number of user, please check it for more detailed information.

So far I don’t find any significant downside on using this platform, but the latest time I used this is on 2023. Some people said that the platform is quite heavy, and having some problem with the Audio Visual. But it’s years ago. Also take into consideration about security and data, since it’s non-US and non-EU platform, so you need to take a look on their policy about this.

I’ll make more article about all these 3 platform in the future so we can compare those platform fairly in many variable and perspective.

Conclusion

For conclusion, I believe this Gather 2.0 update is way bigger than I expected before. Of course something big will be happened, and it will be pros and cons around it. Me personally, love to be adaptive than being on the left or right. I see many opportunity around this and hope we can see it through together.

So keep in touch with me, if you just want to discuss about migrating to other platform, just let me know through my contact page. I’ll be happy to answer every questions. If you want to see the full announcement from Gather, you can see it here. See you on the next article!