Customers
Customers
There are no stories on this page yet, and that is the honest answer rather than an oversight. So here is the thing that would have been more useful anyway: how to evaluate a supplier who cannot show you any.
Consonas is new. We have no customer stories to publish because we do not yet have customers willing to be named, and inventing some would be both dishonest and obvious. When there are real ones who are happy to be identified, they will appear here with their permission.
Evaluating anyone
Six questions worth more than a reference
Ask these of us and of everybody else you are considering. The answers are checkable, which is the property a reference does not have.
- Can you get your data out before you put it in?
- Ask for an export on day one, on the free plan, without asking permission. If the answer involves a support ticket, a paid tier or a waiting period, the portability promise is decorative. On Consonas, export is complete, free, on every plan, at any time, including after you stop paying.
- What does the product refuse to do?
- Every supplier will tell you what their software does. Ask what it does not. A supplier who cannot answer either has not thought about it or has decided not to tell you, and both are informative. Every product page here carries the answer in writing.
- Where is the data, and can it move?
- Ask which jurisdiction, whether it is fixed, and what happens if you choose wrongly. Ours is chosen at signup, is permanent, and is physical rather than a label, because the database is created in that region.
- What happens when the supplier stops?
- Every small supplier should be asked and none of them likes it. The answer that matters is not their funding position, it is whether you hold a current copy of your data in a format that opens without their software. If the answer depends on their goodwill, the risk is real.
- Who can see your records at the supplier?
- Ask who has access, under what circumstances, and whether it is recorded. Ask specifically whether your data trains anything. A supplier who has not written this down anywhere has not decided it.
- What is the evidence when something goes wrong?
- Ask to see the audit trail on the cheapest plan. If it is a paid feature, understand what that means: the evidence you need in a dispute arrives with an invoice. Ours is on every plan including the free one, permanently.
The format itself
What a case study should contain, and usually does not
Written now, before we have any, so that the standard was set when it cost us nothing to set it.
| Part of a case study | The usual version | What we will publish |
|---|---|---|
| Who they are | A logo and a sector. | The organisation, the size, the trade, and who agreed to it being published. |
| What they used before | Spreadsheets, described vaguely. | Exactly what it was, including where it was genuinely working. |
| What the migration cost | Omitted. | How long it took, who did it, what did not come across, and what had to be retyped. |
| What broke | Omitted. | What went wrong during the change and what we had to fix. |
| What they still do elsewhere | Omitted, implying we replaced everything. | Named. Almost every customer keeps two or three other systems, and pretending otherwise is the most common lie in this format. |
| The numbers | A percentage improvement with no baseline. | The measurement, the baseline, and who measured it. If we cannot show the method we will not print the number. |
| The quotation | Written by the supplier's marketing team and approved by the customer. | Written by the customer, in their words, unedited except for length with their agreement. |
Consent to appear here is not permanent either. If a customer wants their story gone they write and it goes, without our asking why and without a notice period, because nothing anywhere grants us the use of their name in perpetuity.
A customer story that reports only the improvement has had its interesting half deleted, because the interesting half is what the migration cost, what broke, and what they still do somewhere else.
Which is why the standard for this page was written before there was anything to put on it.
Being early
What it costs you and what it buys you
The risk, named specifically
We are unproven. There is no independent penetration test and no certifications, so a procurement process that requires SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is one we do not currently pass. There is no partner network and no consultant in your city who already knows the product. The list of systems we connect to is short. Features you may consider essential are planned rather than built, and the roadmap says which.
If your procurement form has a mandatory field for three referenceable customers, that is where this usually ends, and it usually ends silently. We will not invent names to fill it. What exists instead is written down: the security page and its list of what we do not have, the data processing terms, the named sub processors, the terms and what their liability clause does not promise, and, about us and about every other United Kingdom supplier on your list, the Companies House register: who the company is, who runs it, and how long it has filed.
There is also nobody in your trade we could introduce you to. The sector pages, whether you read recruitment or maintenance and facilities, are written from what the work looks like rather than from customers doing it, and each one says what Consonas is not before it says what it is.
The advantage, also named specifically
What you ask for has a real chance of being built, because we are small enough to change direction and there is no backlog of ten thousand other customers ahead of you. The person answering the address is somebody who can change the product. There is no sales team, no qualification call and no demonstration you have to sit through.
Fewer people have access to anything here, which is a real security property rather than a marketing one, and the other half of that trade is that there are fewer people to notice something, which the security page treats as a risk rather than hiding.
Deliberately absent
What is missing here, and what would still be missing when we could fill it
Some of this page is empty because we are new. The rest is empty on purpose and would stay empty on the day there is a queue of organisations willing to be named.
No wall of marks, now or later
We will not assemble one when we can, and the reason is that we would have to choose the threshold. Whatever we picked, whether it is a paying organisation, an organisation still active after six months, or anybody who ever opened an account, the choice would be invisible to you. The wall would then carry exactly as much information as our own willingness to be strict about it, which is the one thing you cannot check. Names belong inside stories, where you can see the size, the trade, what they use and what they do not, or they do not belong on the page.
No count of organisations
No line inviting you to join a growing number of businesses, and no figure anywhere on this site. A count is worse here than it usually is, because the free plan is permanent, so any total mixes an organisation running its entire week through the product with one that was opened on a Tuesday afternoon and abandoned. A published count also only ever moves in one direction in public: the month it falls is the month it quietly leaves the page. If we would not publish it falling, we should not publish it rising.
No stars, no review site badges, no awards
There is no profile to find on the review sites, and that is a decision instead of an oversight. A badge on one of those sites follows a campaign to collect reviews, which means what it really measures is how hard a supplier asked, and the asking is usually done at the moment a customer is most pleased. Awards in this category are mostly a paid entry with a panel attached, and a buyer who has worked in software knows that, which turns the badge into a statement about who we think we are talking to.
An empty page
Asked about having nothing to show
Do you have any customers at all?
Yes, and none who have agreed to be named publicly yet. That is an ordinary position for a product at this stage, and it is different from having none, so we would rather draw the distinction than let the empty page imply the worse answer.
Why not publish an anonymous story?
Because an unverifiable story is worth nothing. A quotation from a professional services firm in the south of England is indistinguishable from an invented one, and a reader who suspects it is invented has learned something about everything else on this site.
Can I talk to an existing customer?
Ask, and if someone is willing we will introduce you. Not a list, because any list handed to you by any supplier has been chosen, and we will not pretend that a curated reference is neutral evidence. We will not introduce you to somebody who stopped using it either, because ending a relationship with us is not volunteering for an afternoon of our sales process, though we will answer in writing what has gone wrong and what somebody has left over. Ask whoever you do speak to what did not work rather than only what did.
What does it cost to find out?
An afternoon. Create a free organisation, import a spreadsheet, put a week of real work through it, and run an export. The free plan needs no card and has no time limit, so the worst case is that you spend half a day, take your data with you, and leave. A supplier who is confident about the product makes it cheap to find out; a supplier who is not makes you talk to someone first.
Our board wants evidence before we commit. What can we put in front of them?
Not a reference, because there is not one to give. What exists in writing is listed further up this page: the security page and its list of what we do not have, the data processing terms, the named sub processors, the roadmap with its four states, and an export you can run on the free plan and hand them as a file. A board is usually asking whether leaving is possible, and the export answers that better than a testimonial does.
Can we be a case study in exchange for a discount?
No, and the refusal is not a negotiating position. A story bought with a discount is an advertisement, an honest advertisement has to say so, and one that says so persuades nobody. Worse, if any story here had been paid for, a reader would be right to assume all of them were, so the first paid one would destroy the value of every other.
Do you name customers privately, in a sales conversation?
No, and there is no sales conversation to name them in. Consent to be named is consent to be named, not consent to be mentioned quietly to somebody who cannot check. A supplier who names their customers to you in confidence is naming you to somebody else on the same terms.
When will this page have stories on it?
When there are customers who have used the product long enough to have an opinion worth reading and who are happy to be identified. There is no date, because a date on this page would be exactly the kind of claim the rest of the site refuses to make.
Be one of the ones on this page later
A free organisation, no card, no time limit, and a complete export whenever you want to leave.
Three people, a thousand relationships, no card and no time limit.