11 ms·

I analyzed 250 SaaS pricing pages

299 points by jackgavigan 11y ago

jamiesonbecker 11y ago
At Userify[1], we just made our primary product (user and SSH key management for cloud servers) completely free. We're charging incrementals for feature upgrades, faster sync (from 3 minutes down to 10s), etc. On the other hand, this hasn't slowed down our enterprise sales cycle at all; in fact, it seems to have sped it up, with five enterprise deals in the pipeline right now. However, this approach is risky and it's really hard to get the balance right; companies that have raised rounds might have to answer to investors. Still, sometimes it's worth prioritizing long-term growth over short-term revenue. My view is that we should always have something free or very cheap for the smaller technologist/hacker/startup. They tend to bring their favorite solutions to other larger companies. Goodwill is one of the best growth factors. 1. https://userify.com https://userify.com
- zephod 11y ago
  Trying to scroll your website on a Mac trackpad causes it to jump around like crazy. Did you install some too-clever-for-its-own-good Javascript? (Has anyone else noticed this is an increasing - and annoying - trend?)
  - agopaul 11y ago
    As an MBP trackpad user, I can't think of a more annoying web trend. To the point that I'm thinking of finding a way to disable this kind of behaviour and make a Chrome extension to block this thing everywhere.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - Klathmon 11y ago
      Web developers just shouldn't ever try to fight the useragent. If you find yourself trying to "fix" a UI/UX in the browser itself, stop. I don't care if you want 300ms faster clicks on mobile, or to force smooth scrolling in chrome, or to hijack right click for your sharing stuff, or whatever. You are breaking stuff trying to do those things, and it's ruining my experience on your site.
      - paulcole 11y ago
        If their A/B testing indicates a net gain, why should they care about a specific user's experience?
        marcosdumay 11y ago
        User agents change. If it's a clear win, they'll implement the behavior soon, and you'll be left with a broken site.
  - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
    Thanks for the heads-up, and sorry about that. Was this on Safari? Removed smoothscroll.js. Is it working better now?
    - amackera 11y ago
      Working fine for me
      - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
        Thanks. :) I'm on Linux Chromium and it worked fine for me, but maybe it was Safari not liking the accelerated scrolling plugin. (Off-topic, why are so many site themes bloated with bells-and-whistles..)
    - Cyberdog 11y ago
      Safari user here, not noticing any scroll highjacking currently. Thank you. Your web site still does other awful things, but at least you've banished the most obnoxious, most instantly-want-to-close-the-tab sin.
      - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
        Thanks for checking! What other awful things? We'd like to fix those too!
        Cyberdog 11y ago
        Okay, well, first off, keep in mind that I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to the web and generally dislike more things about the modern web than other people, so I don't really fault you for just writing me off and ignoring all of this. That being said, here are, in my opinion, the remaining awful things about your web site. 1. The loading animation. I did not wait for your page to load in order to wait for your page to load. Also, if I have JavaScript disabled or JavaScript breaks for some reason, all I can see is that loading animation - absolutely zero of your front page content. 2. The text scrolls up into the middle of the page. Nothing should move on your page without my permission. 3. The fading in/out red text. See 2. 4. The spastic dots/lines following the pointer around above the globe image. See 2. 5. As I scroll, the bar at the top hovers over the page content. This breaks PgUp/PgDn behavior, as it covers content, as the height of the page no longer matches the amount of the page that's actually legible. Also, the bar changes size and color. See 2. 6. You're using a custom font. Are the perfectly fine fonts already installed on my system not good enough? Must you really waste my bandwidth and slow down your page loading time for the sake of your brand? Fortunately, you're using one hosted by Google; I have `127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com` in my hosts file, so it actually didn't effect me. I could still see it trying to happen when opening up Web Inspector, though. 7. I'm seeing your total front page weight as 1.82MB. global_map2.png is 512K. essentials.css is 468K - Jesus, that's a lot of CSS. Even the HTML file is 111K - apparently because you're inlining jQuery, on every page, forcing my browser to redownload it for every page load when it could just grab it from cache after the first one. That's all I'll say for now. I need to get back to work. Hopefully this is of some help, though. EDIT: Just to balance things out, here's a good thing - you're bouncing users to the HTTPS URL for your site, even when we're not logged in (or about to). Good!
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- alextgordon 11y ago
  You need a better layout for your API documentation. It's a wall of text. Add in a navigation sidebar, or better yet just copy Stripe. Also the how-tos are too longwinded. You could probably reduce the quantity of prose by 50% or more. e.g. the very first paragraph "Getting logged in is easy and takes only a second..." is waffle and missing a vital opportunity to explain how the damn thing works!
  - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
    Alex thx -- this is great feedback. We'll get these cleaned up!
    - wise_young_man 11y ago
      There's an open source project called Slate [1] which is basically a static site generator for API docs you might consider which looks like Stripe's API docs. [1]: https://github.com/tripit/slate https://github.com/tripit/slate
paxtonab 11y ago
After going through the article I would have really liked to see what the average prices for these companies are, even though only 48 out of the 250 SaaS companies published pricing pages. On average there were 3.5 pricing options per company, with the highest priced option leading towards a "Contact Us" 38% of the time. I feel like the companies that published prices were not targeting enterprise level companies (just a hunch), so seeing the range of their prices could be a very interesting guide for pricing SaaS outside of enterprise sales. For enterprise SaaS an analysis of the Lead Gen forms for the other 202 companies would be very interesting.
- Cyberdog 11y ago
  > After going through the article I would have really liked to see what the average prices for these companies are Seeing as how the services they provide will be so different, would it really be a relevant number? Even then, how would you calculate it? The average of each company's lowest price plan, or the average of the average of each company's plans, or the average per-user price, or…?
sandstrom 11y ago
This is the original article: https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-pages/ https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-pages/ (perhaps the link could be updated?)
pc86 11y ago
Alternate title: "I analyzed 48 SaaS pricing pages, and quoted someone off of Quora."
peteretep 11y ago
> Enterprise customers just want to buy. Jason says > that price doesn’t matter for enterprises. More than > 80 percent of the time, they just want to get set up > with a solution as efficiently as possible. Price > comes after features. That's ... misleading. Software is often not just purchased by an enterprise all at once. More frequently, some team with a small budget decides it would be useful to use tool X. Someone with a company card is put upon to purchase a license for the 5 people in the team. Other teams get interested, and start using it. Costs get to the point where it needs to be sent to procurement, at which point, it becomes an enterprise software deal. But it didn't start that way - it started with some small team who are price sensitive trialing it...
- pc86 11y ago
  I think that's the minority of most Enterprise software deals, though. Typically it's sold to someone completely removed from the process (e.g., ServiceNow being sold to the CTO).
  - peteretep 11y ago
    I think that depends on if it's CIO-domain (email, calendering, desktop control) or CTO-domain (dev tools etc). The latter I've rarely (but not never) seen foist upon uninterested developers.
- dkersten 11y ago
  And by the time its reached procurement, price doesn't matter - they just want to buy.
  - peteretep 11y ago
    Sure. But as per the article, this is used as a strategy to discourage pricing upfront. Which will stop it from ever getting as far as procurement.
    - dkersten 11y ago
lvspiff 11y ago
Working at a public university I can say the recent move towards "contact us" pricing without including ANY pricing information has led to us not being able to look at many products. The way it works in my state is unless the vendor is already licensed with the university I'm not allowed to contact the vendor except to get a quote. If you start to give me a sales pitch asking questions about needs I am going to cut you off and hang up because its illegal for me to work with the vendor prior to an agreement in place. If your product is over 25K then I have to conduct an RFP which then means your company gets to make a pitch on paper and good luck convincing your product that I want is better than no name product I've never heard of from Oracle/IBM because they can undercut you because procurement has no clue what features/setup costs will be additional in their product that isn't in yours. They just go with what is cheaper. On the other hand you give me up front on your website 1 user pricing I can take that public information and multiply it by the number we need, send it up the chain, make a convincing argument for sole sourcing, and then you will suddenly look like heroes with procurement because they were able to get it "so much cheaper" because I just multiplied what it cost for 1 * 30,000 (e.x.: number of students).
- caseysoftware 11y ago
  Great points. I've also seen another pattern with per user or consumption-based systems... When something is low enough to experiment with and still fall into the "petty cash" area, an employee can buy a little (or for a month) and test it out. If they're somewhat successful, they can expand it out to their immediate team, still with a tiny budget. As they prove out usefulness/value and expand their users/usage, obviously the cost goes up. But by the time they have to "Get Approval" from someone really high up - like a VP or procurement group - they have X users or Y months of success. Selling it to the higher ups then becomes easier and a more likely sale.
  - douche 11y ago
    That was pretty much the Yammer sales strategy, as I observed it. Infiltrate the customer by making it free and easy to sign up an organization, build a user base organically, without having to involve those controlling the purse-strings. Eventually, there's enough people using it that compliance and security becomes an issue, and the business sort of has to pay for the enterprise support to CYA.
nerdy 11y ago
The title is somewhat misleading because only 48/250 had actual pricing pages, the others had what really amounts to "contact us" pages for their sales teams. Fortunately it's still an informative read, and even 48 pages are enough for meaningful discussion of pricing pages. The original post has additional infographics at the end of the article (a helpful way to reason about ideas contained within after going through it all in text): https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-pages/ https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-pages/ As a consumer I often feel like contact-style "pricing" pages are a way of trapping customers into a hard-sell. Granted some pricing structures are complicated out of necessity, especially those where usage plays a significant role in the cost to the provider (substantial bandwidth transfer, hardware/setup, human resources). More often than not I immediately abandon any such service if contacting for pricing is the only option. It was surprising to see 80%+ (202/250) of companies didn't list their pricing because my personal real-world experience feels like the inverse. The article discusses the reasons for the contact-only approach, which boil down to preventing biases for enterprise customers. While that's understandable in some situations, not all SaaS is intended to target enterprise customers. It goes on to consider pros/cons of the multifaceted concept that is tiered pricing. If read this much of my comment but not the article, go read it now! (A couple typos for the author: "boost revenue"→"boosts revenue", "Abscense"→"Absence")
- agopaul 11y ago
  The article seems a bit simplistic in the way it draws conclusions. Still I wonder why so many companies picked the most counterintuitive solution. Edit: I've come to believe that enterprise customers are likely to have different, more strict requirements compared to SMB customers. This is probably why, for enterprise sales, it could make more sense to approach the pricing part in a more traditional way.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
frik 11y ago
> Just 4% of companies offer pricing on a sliding scale Interesting. As a consumer I would like a slider, but as a company one wants to upsale the user a higher priced plan. Recently, I saw several new SaaS companies that have a slider.
- dkyc 11y ago
  Actually, slider-pricing is often a bad idea for B2B-SaaS tools. Simple reason: Almost every purchasing process in almost every company (other than software startups) is expecting a fixed, monthly rate. Put yourself in the mind of your champion: Do you want to push a deal like any else through management, procurement, etc (which is already hard enough), or do the same process every month for a slightly different price point?
  - frik 11y ago
    You are right. I assume these SaaS vendors try to attract end-user (B2C) and small companies (B2B).
natvod 11y ago
> What can this teach us about SaaS pricing pages? > Even the most successful SaaS companies in the world don’t conform to the ‘best practices’ laid out by conversion specialists. Not sure I agree with this conclusion. Obviously you should test to see what works for your audience but imo, the whole point of comparing how each company does X is to extract the most common patterns people can use as solid starting points. The article would have been a lot of more useful if it listed at the end the most common elements SaaS pricing plans share like 63% offer a free trial. It's a waste of time to try to design from scratch instead of referencing what most of your peers are doing. Also, just because some SaaS companies don't conform to the best practices, it doesn't mean that their way necessarily converts better. Maybe they would convert more if they did certain best practices.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
agopaul 11y ago
I'm curious to hear from a SaaS which moved from a public to a non-public pricing (or vice-versa). Why did you do it? Did it work better?
- berkay 11y ago
  We chose not to do so, but I can tell you why you'd move to non-public pricing (at least have a non public pricing tier). As much as people love to blame vendors, this is mostly due to dysfunctional nature of the large enterprise buyers. They are addicted to discounts. First the buyer contacts you asks for one then after everything gets said and done done, procurement gets involved and ask for more discounts (seen as their job). Having listed pricing becomes a problem when going through such process, so most vendors either choose not to publish their prices, or have a tier for the enterprise that is not published.
- gk1 11y ago
  I'm a customer acquisition consultant for B2B software co's, so I've been involved in a fair amount of decisions around this. Without sharing specifics, I can objectively say that requiring prospects to contact you to learn about pricing will... 1. ... Weed out non-serious prospects such as students, freelancers, small businesses, etc. 2. ... NOT deter serious prospects (enterprise users). They are used to this process and even expect it.
  - agopaul 11y ago
    Makes sense, but what if you want to sell to both SMB and enterprise customers?
    - gk1 11y ago
      That's when you show prices for all but the enterprise plan, for which you have a "Contact Us" button.
  - Chris2048 11y ago
    Is serious/non-serious so binary? My biggest issue is I wouldn't want to commit anything, or give too much information away just to get a ballpark figure. I'd also assume that I'd be aiding price discrimination - There is no problem having up-front ballpark pricing and a 'contact us' link. Hell, just having a high ballpark figure will weed out students and small businesses.
BillFranklin 11y ago
My colleague, Ed, wrote a post about B2B SaaS pricing pages a little earlier this year: https://blog.chartmogul.com/2015/05/b2b-saas-pricing/ https://blog.chartmogul.com/2015/05/b2b-saas-pricing/.
samteeeee 11y ago
"Peyton is a poo" at the bottom of the process st homepage?
- KevinBongart 11y ago
  Yep, cool footer! http://screenshots.kevinbongart.net/VHUpQ.png http://screenshots.kevinbongart.net/VHUpQ.png
  - mangeletti 11y ago
    Wait, what? Where is this? On the homepage and on the article page, I didn't see this. Was the website "hacked"?
jff 11y ago
I analyzed 250 SaaS pages, and all of them were using Bootstrap
- phoogathrw 11y ago
  Wow, did you really? Or is this a sarcastic comment? If serious, that's pretty amazing.
JonoBB 11y ago
Pretty good article overall, but some of the data is conflicting: > HubSpot’s fantastic article about decision fatigue included a study which showed customers who were presented with six options instead of 24 were 10 times more likely to buy. > Sliding scales allow customers to be ultra-specific with their needs and pay for only exactly what they’re going to use. Plus, according to Peep Laja, giving users something to play around with will keep them sticking around for longer and subconsciously soaking in the details and pricing of your product.
noahmbarr 11y ago
Here's a plan B based on several experiences with enterprise SaaS: Start with something that isn't awful. Get it up early. A/B test that crap out of out. Keep it simple -- Only have one unit of measure (UoM) or feature differentiator at first. Having multiple points of differentiation or UoM leads to confounded experimentation. Try to add more " per's " over time :) You can take forever debating this stuff. Data is the only guide.
prabhat08 11y ago
good
tdaltonc 11y ago
Anything to say about trends over time or what works (as apposed to what is)?
pbreit 11y ago
I'm not sure there's a takeaway from all this. My sense is that pricing is still really poorly understood. The one key thing to understand about product configuration and pricing is that it depends a huge amount on how flush the customer is with money. Bootstrap/unfunded/mom-pop will pay zero or very little. A company with some friends/family or angel/seed funding can spend a little bit. A fully funded or larger company can spend a lot.
namuol 11y ago
Best sales advice I've ever received: Ask yourself not how to sell, but what is worth selling. If you're struggling with the how, you're probably not very happy with the what.
limeyx 11y ago
I simply wont buy anything where the only option is "Contact us"

299 points by jackgavigan 11y ago

At Userify[1], we just made our primary product (user and SSH key management for cloud servers) completely free. We're charging incrementals for feature upgrades, faster sync (from 3 minutes down to 10s), etc. On the other hand, this hasn't slowed down our enterprise sales cycle at all; in fact, it seems to have sped it up, with five enterprise deals in the pipeline right now. However, this approach is risky and it's really hard to get the balance right; companies that have raised rounds might have to answer to investors. Still, sometimes it's worth prioritizing long-term growth over short-term revenue. My view is that we should always have something free or very cheap for the smaller technologist/hacker/startup. They tend to bring their favorite solutions to other larger companies. Goodwill is one of the best growth factors. 1. https://userify.com https://userify.com

zephod 11y ago
Trying to scroll your website on a Mac trackpad causes it to jump around like crazy. Did you install some too-clever-for-its-own-good Javascript? (Has anyone else noticed this is an increasing - and annoying - trend?)
- agopaul 11y ago
  As an MBP trackpad user, I can't think of a more annoying web trend. To the point that I'm thinking of finding a way to disable this kind of behaviour and make a Chrome extension to block this thing everywhere.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    Web developers just shouldn't ever try to fight the useragent. If you find yourself trying to "fix" a UI/UX in the browser itself, stop. I don't care if you want 300ms faster clicks on mobile, or to force smooth scrolling in chrome, or to hijack right click for your sharing stuff, or whatever. You are breaking stuff trying to do those things, and it's ruining my experience on your site.
    - paulcole 11y ago
      If their A/B testing indicates a net gain, why should they care about a specific user's experience?
      - marcosdumay 11y ago
        User agents change. If it's a clear win, they'll implement the behavior soon, and you'll be left with a broken site.
- jamiesonbecker 11y ago
  Thanks for the heads-up, and sorry about that. Was this on Safari? Removed smoothscroll.js. Is it working better now?
  - amackera 11y ago
    Working fine for me
    - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
      Thanks. :) I'm on Linux Chromium and it worked fine for me, but maybe it was Safari not liking the accelerated scrolling plugin. (Off-topic, why are so many site themes bloated with bells-and-whistles..)
  - Cyberdog 11y ago
    Safari user here, not noticing any scroll highjacking currently. Thank you. Your web site still does other awful things, but at least you've banished the most obnoxious, most instantly-want-to-close-the-tab sin.
    - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
      Thanks for checking! What other awful things? We'd like to fix those too!
      - Cyberdog 11y ago
        Okay, well, first off, keep in mind that I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to the web and generally dislike more things about the modern web than other people, so I don't really fault you for just writing me off and ignoring all of this. That being said, here are, in my opinion, the remaining awful things about your web site. 1. The loading animation. I did not wait for your page to load in order to wait for your page to load. Also, if I have JavaScript disabled or JavaScript breaks for some reason, all I can see is that loading animation - absolutely zero of your front page content. 2. The text scrolls up into the middle of the page. Nothing should move on your page without my permission. 3. The fading in/out red text. See 2. 4. The spastic dots/lines following the pointer around above the globe image. See 2. 5. As I scroll, the bar at the top hovers over the page content. This breaks PgUp/PgDn behavior, as it covers content, as the height of the page no longer matches the amount of the page that's actually legible. Also, the bar changes size and color. See 2. 6. You're using a custom font. Are the perfectly fine fonts already installed on my system not good enough? Must you really waste my bandwidth and slow down your page loading time for the sake of your brand? Fortunately, you're using one hosted by Google; I have `127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com` in my hosts file, so it actually didn't effect me. I could still see it trying to happen when opening up Web Inspector, though. 7. I'm seeing your total front page weight as 1.82MB. global_map2.png is 512K. essentials.css is 468K - Jesus, that's a lot of CSS. Even the HTML file is 111K - apparently because you're inlining jQuery, on every page, forcing my browser to redownload it for every page load when it could just grab it from cache after the first one. That's all I'll say for now. I need to get back to work. Hopefully this is of some help, though. EDIT: Just to balance things out, here's a good thing - you're bouncing users to the HTTPS URL for your site, even when we're not logged in (or about to). Good!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
alextgordon 11y ago
You need a better layout for your API documentation. It's a wall of text. Add in a navigation sidebar, or better yet just copy Stripe. Also the how-tos are too longwinded. You could probably reduce the quantity of prose by 50% or more. e.g. the very first paragraph "Getting logged in is easy and takes only a second..." is waffle and missing a vital opportunity to explain how the damn thing works!
- jamiesonbecker 11y ago
  Alex thx -- this is great feedback. We'll get these cleaned up!
  - wise_young_man 11y ago
    There's an open source project called Slate [1] which is basically a static site generator for API docs you might consider which looks like Stripe's API docs. [1]: https://github.com/tripit/slate https://github.com/tripit/slate

paxtonab 11y ago

After going through the article I would have really liked to see what the average prices for these companies are, even though only 48 out of the 250 SaaS companies published pricing pages. On average there were 3.5 pricing options per company, with the highest priced option leading towards a "Contact Us" 38% of the time. I feel like the companies that published prices were not targeting enterprise level companies (just a hunch), so seeing the range of their prices could be a very interesting guide for pricing SaaS outside of enterprise sales. For enterprise SaaS an analysis of the Lead Gen forms for the other 202 companies would be very interesting.

Cyberdog 11y ago
> After going through the article I would have really liked to see what the average prices for these companies are Seeing as how the services they provide will be so different, would it really be a relevant number? Even then, how would you calculate it? The average of each company's lowest price plan, or the average of the average of each company's plans, or the average per-user price, or…?

sandstrom 11y ago

This is the original article: https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-pages/ https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-pages/ (perhaps the link could be updated?)

pc86 11y ago

Alternate title: "I analyzed 48 SaaS pricing pages, and quoted someone off of Quora."

peteretep 11y ago

> Enterprise customers just want to buy. Jason says > that price doesn’t matter for enterprises. More than > 80 percent of the time, they just want to get set up > with a solution as efficiently as possible. Price > comes after features. That's ... misleading. Software is often not just purchased by an enterprise all at once. More frequently, some team with a small budget decides it would be useful to use tool X. Someone with a company card is put upon to purchase a license for the 5 people in the team. Other teams get interested, and start using it. Costs get to the point where it needs to be sent to procurement, at which point, it becomes an enterprise software deal. But it didn't start that way - it started with some small team who are price sensitive trialing it...

pc86 11y ago
I think that's the minority of most Enterprise software deals, though. Typically it's sold to someone completely removed from the process (e.g., ServiceNow being sold to the CTO).
- peteretep 11y ago
  I think that depends on if it's CIO-domain (email, calendering, desktop control) or CTO-domain (dev tools etc). The latter I've rarely (but not never) seen foist upon uninterested developers.
dkersten 11y ago
And by the time its reached procurement, price doesn't matter - they just want to buy.
- peteretep 11y ago
  Sure. But as per the article, this is used as a strategy to discourage pricing upfront. Which will stop it from ever getting as far as procurement.
  - dkersten 11y ago

lvspiff 11y ago

Working at a public university I can say the recent move towards "contact us" pricing without including ANY pricing information has led to us not being able to look at many products. The way it works in my state is unless the vendor is already licensed with the university I'm not allowed to contact the vendor except to get a quote. If you start to give me a sales pitch asking questions about needs I am going to cut you off and hang up because its illegal for me to work with the vendor prior to an agreement in place. If your product is over 25K then I have to conduct an RFP which then means your company gets to make a pitch on paper and good luck convincing your product that I want is better than no name product I've never heard of from Oracle/IBM because they can undercut you because procurement has no clue what features/setup costs will be additional in their product that isn't in yours. They just go with what is cheaper. On the other hand you give me up front on your website 1 user pricing I can take that public information and multiply it by the number we need, send it up the chain, make a convincing argument for sole sourcing, and then you will suddenly look like heroes with procurement because they were able to get it "so much cheaper" because I just multiplied what it cost for 1 * 30,000 (e.x.: number of students).

caseysoftware 11y ago
Great points. I've also seen another pattern with per user or consumption-based systems... When something is low enough to experiment with and still fall into the "petty cash" area, an employee can buy a little (or for a month) and test it out. If they're somewhat successful, they can expand it out to their immediate team, still with a tiny budget. As they prove out usefulness/value and expand their users/usage, obviously the cost goes up. But by the time they have to "Get Approval" from someone really high up - like a VP or procurement group - they have X users or Y months of success. Selling it to the higher ups then becomes easier and a more likely sale.
- douche 11y ago
  That was pretty much the Yammer sales strategy, as I observed it. Infiltrate the customer by making it free and easy to sign up an organization, build a user base organically, without having to involve those controlling the purse-strings. Eventually, there's enough people using it that compliance and security becomes an issue, and the business sort of has to pay for the enterprise support to CYA.

nerdy 11y ago

The title is somewhat misleading because only 48/250 had actual pricing pages, the others had what really amounts to "contact us" pages for their sales teams. Fortunately it's still an informative read, and even 48 pages are enough for meaningful discussion of pricing pages. The original post has additional infographics at the end of the article (a helpful way to reason about ideas contained within after going through it all in text): https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-pages/ https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-pages/ As a consumer I often feel like contact-style "pricing" pages are a way of trapping customers into a hard-sell. Granted some pricing structures are complicated out of necessity, especially those where usage plays a significant role in the cost to the provider (substantial bandwidth transfer, hardware/setup, human resources). More often than not I immediately abandon any such service if contacting for pricing is the only option. It was surprising to see 80%+ (202/250) of companies didn't list their pricing because my personal real-world experience feels like the inverse. The article discusses the reasons for the contact-only approach, which boil down to preventing biases for enterprise customers. While that's understandable in some situations, not all SaaS is intended to target enterprise customers. It goes on to consider pros/cons of the multifaceted concept that is tiered pricing. If read this much of my comment but not the article, go read it now! (A couple typos for the author: "boost revenue"→"boosts revenue", "Abscense"→"Absence")

agopaul 11y ago
The article seems a bit simplistic in the way it draws conclusions. Still I wonder why so many companies picked the most counterintuitive solution. Edit: I've come to believe that enterprise customers are likely to have different, more strict requirements compared to SMB customers. This is probably why, for enterprise sales, it could make more sense to approach the pricing part in a more traditional way.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

frik 11y ago

> Just 4% of companies offer pricing on a sliding scale Interesting. As a consumer I would like a slider, but as a company one wants to upsale the user a higher priced plan. Recently, I saw several new SaaS companies that have a slider.

dkyc 11y ago
Actually, slider-pricing is often a bad idea for B2B-SaaS tools. Simple reason: Almost every purchasing process in almost every company (other than software startups) is expecting a fixed, monthly rate. Put yourself in the mind of your champion: Do you want to push a deal like any else through management, procurement, etc (which is already hard enough), or do the same process every month for a slightly different price point?
- frik 11y ago
  You are right. I assume these SaaS vendors try to attract end-user (B2C) and small companies (B2B).

natvod 11y ago

> What can this teach us about SaaS pricing pages? > Even the most successful SaaS companies in the world don’t conform to the ‘best practices’ laid out by conversion specialists. Not sure I agree with this conclusion. Obviously you should test to see what works for your audience but imo, the whole point of comparing how each company does X is to extract the most common patterns people can use as solid starting points. The article would have been a lot of more useful if it listed at the end the most common elements SaaS pricing plans share like 63% offer a free trial. It's a waste of time to try to design from scratch instead of referencing what most of your peers are doing. Also, just because some SaaS companies don't conform to the best practices, it doesn't mean that their way necessarily converts better. Maybe they would convert more if they did certain best practices.

deleted 11y ago

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agopaul 11y ago

I'm curious to hear from a SaaS which moved from a public to a non-public pricing (or vice-versa). Why did you do it? Did it work better?

berkay 11y ago
We chose not to do so, but I can tell you why you'd move to non-public pricing (at least have a non public pricing tier). As much as people love to blame vendors, this is mostly due to dysfunctional nature of the large enterprise buyers. They are addicted to discounts. First the buyer contacts you asks for one then after everything gets said and done done, procurement gets involved and ask for more discounts (seen as their job). Having listed pricing becomes a problem when going through such process, so most vendors either choose not to publish their prices, or have a tier for the enterprise that is not published.
gk1 11y ago
I'm a customer acquisition consultant for B2B software co's, so I've been involved in a fair amount of decisions around this. Without sharing specifics, I can objectively say that requiring prospects to contact you to learn about pricing will... 1. ... Weed out non-serious prospects such as students, freelancers, small businesses, etc. 2. ... NOT deter serious prospects (enterprise users). They are used to this process and even expect it.
- agopaul 11y ago
  Makes sense, but what if you want to sell to both SMB and enterprise customers?
  - gk1 11y ago
    That's when you show prices for all but the enterprise plan, for which you have a "Contact Us" button.
- Chris2048 11y ago
  Is serious/non-serious so binary? My biggest issue is I wouldn't want to commit anything, or give too much information away just to get a ballpark figure. I'd also assume that I'd be aiding price discrimination - There is no problem having up-front ballpark pricing and a 'contact us' link. Hell, just having a high ballpark figure will weed out students and small businesses.

BillFranklin 11y ago

My colleague, Ed, wrote a post about B2B SaaS pricing pages a little earlier this year: https://blog.chartmogul.com/2015/05/b2b-saas-pricing/ https://blog.chartmogul.com/2015/05/b2b-saas-pricing/.

samteeeee 11y ago

"Peyton is a poo" at the bottom of the process st homepage?

KevinBongart 11y ago
Yep, cool footer! http://screenshots.kevinbongart.net/VHUpQ.png http://screenshots.kevinbongart.net/VHUpQ.png
- mangeletti 11y ago
  Wait, what? Where is this? On the homepage and on the article page, I didn't see this. Was the website "hacked"?

jff 11y ago

I analyzed 250 SaaS pages, and all of them were using Bootstrap

phoogathrw 11y ago
Wow, did you really? Or is this a sarcastic comment? If serious, that's pretty amazing.

JonoBB 11y ago

Pretty good article overall, but some of the data is conflicting: > HubSpot’s fantastic article about decision fatigue included a study which showed customers who were presented with six options instead of 24 were 10 times more likely to buy. > Sliding scales allow customers to be ultra-specific with their needs and pay for only exactly what they’re going to use. Plus, according to Peep Laja, giving users something to play around with will keep them sticking around for longer and subconsciously soaking in the details and pricing of your product.

noahmbarr 11y ago

Here's a plan B based on several experiences with enterprise SaaS: Start with something that isn't awful. Get it up early. A/B test that crap out of out. Keep it simple -- Only have one unit of measure (UoM) or feature differentiator at first. Having multiple points of differentiation or UoM leads to confounded experimentation. Try to add more " per's " over time :) You can take forever debating this stuff. Data is the only guide.

prabhat08 11y ago

good

tdaltonc 11y ago

Anything to say about trends over time or what works (as apposed to what is)?

pbreit 11y ago

I'm not sure there's a takeaway from all this. My sense is that pricing is still really poorly understood. The one key thing to understand about product configuration and pricing is that it depends a huge amount on how flush the customer is with money. Bootstrap/unfunded/mom-pop will pay zero or very little. A company with some friends/family or angel/seed funding can spend a little bit. A fully funded or larger company can spend a lot.

namuol 11y ago

Best sales advice I've ever received: Ask yourself not how to sell, but what is worth selling. If you're struggling with the how, you're probably not very happy with the what.

limeyx 11y ago

I simply wont buy anything where the only option is "Contact us"