When we started, we had a 100% founder-led development/releases process, and the Runway team was pretty hands on in helping us level up. Spending less founder time/thought on releases has been extremely high leverage.
Two other top of mind benefits so far have been a) increased visibility with our ops team (we're very ops/field heavy), and b) improved QA consistency with the release checklist feature.
At the moment our main tier is $400/mo, but we're exploring other options for those teams that are smaller and/or at earlier stages.
Re: external clients - This is a really interesting use case that we've chatted to some agencies about. The way we've been thinking about users and roles, it would make a lot of sense to give scoped access to clients and allow them to participate in specific areas as needed!
At the moment, $400/mo is more than the savings calculator suggests we can save, but we're currently 1 full time, 1 part time iOS engineer, 1 release a month, 2 apps (same codebase, whitelabelled). I think $400/mo for ~10 devs makes sense, at that scale it's similar in cost to our other collaboration and CI tools, but I suspect we'd have a hard time justifying it until we're at that sort of scale.
Are there costly features you can cut that could make it, say, $100 for < 5 people perhaps? Something that opens it up to small teams who can then "grow up" on the platform?
We hear you on the math! Our pricing is a work in progress and there's more we'll do on the lower end of the scale for sure. We're hesitant to cut/bundle the product too much but it's a likely option.
If you and your team are interested in trying us out, let's definitely chat though!
Related, I often find pricing doesn't scale down well for smaller teams (for understandable reasons!). What sort of ballpark are you thinking about?
Lastly, are you tackling the case of agency model development with external clients who may be involved in QA or other steps in the process? I see this as a common model in iOS.