DingTalk Goes After Individual Users With a Paid 365 Membership

Jiang Wu · 2024-09-23

*Originally published in Chinese on September 23, 2024.*

DingTalk launches a personal "365 Membership"

DingTalk has introduced a "365 Membership" for individual users. It includes AI search, a personal AI assistant, AI auto-reply and automatic speed-reading. Non-members can still use DingTalk's existing AI features, such as the AI assistant and quick reading.

How the membership works and where it sits

DingTalk's charging logic is very close to WPS's, and its base functions extend much further than WPS's do, so it is hard to say whether people are paying for AI or paying for office software.

Where the document module came from

The document module mostly comes from Wolai, which DingTalk acquired earlier. Had it not been acquired, Wolai would have remained a good document product.

What AI adds to a product

Adding AI on top of a product's own functions can create a lot of extra value. Baidu Wenku, Baidu Netdisk and WPS, all of them basic utilities, have already shown this once. None of them, though, has a messaging user base like DingTalk's.

The personal edition: experience and market potential

As a whole product today, Feishu (known as Lark outside China) is better than DingTalk, and DingTalk is better than WeCom. But all of them have long been fixated on enterprise users. A paid personal edition from DingTalk is a decent option for many users, especially for handling content outside work.

Room in personal productivity

Basic office products have always been scattered across different product systems, with no single unified one. Microsoft pushed its unified suite (Office 365) for years and only held ground in part of the market. In every vertical, meetings, calendars and documents among them, independent products grew up and took the lead. Seen this way, building a personal productivity business on DingTalk may not be a hopeless idea.

The edition's main strength

The logic of DingTalk's personal edition is to connect documents, cloud storage and messaging, which is a genuinely combined choice for users. Look at the three functions together: an ordinary user moving between separate products still lives with some fragmentation.

Operating it, and the challenges

The product managers need to stay clear-headed and not act rashly. They should respect user habits and run it slowly. Management should not force growth, and if they move at the pace of today's user lifecycle there is still a chance.

Lessons from the past

QQ made many similar attempts in the past and in the end made no real progress. Shifts in user habits and usage scenarios also make this very hard.

One more question

When will WeChat release a paid edition?

Home · All articles · Topics · 简体中文