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There are a lot of ways to raise your price while still making it look like a steal. You should definitely split test all of this and pretty much everything yo

There are a lot of ways to raise your price while still making it look like a steal. You should definitely split test all of this and pretty much everything you do, honestly. Price Anchoring: Use a giant unreasonable number for the unlimited plan with 1 month of phone support, 12 month same business day email support, you will install it for them, all the ACH and Credit Card processing through you (and you through stripe), etc. A HUGE list of features to go along with the $574 price tag. Then drastically back off of that pricing for the 10-25 team ($249), 5-10 ($199), 2-5 ($149) and solo ($99) plans. You need to also reduce the features, support windows, contact method as you drop the price, not just the number of users. Additional Revenue Streams: 1) Include your own payment processor and accept payments on their behalf, if you have 500 customers doing a few thousand each month on average, you processing fee will drop a lot. Always default to ACH via Stripe (0.8% fee, and a 25 cent transfer) bill the customer at 2% + $0.30 and you are making money. 2) Annual licensing. Don't give updates away unless it is a bug fix. And make sure to always be improving your product (which it sounds like you are) 3) Cloud hosted. As someone else said take the annual price divided by 12 and add a premium to it (25% or so). Also push updates to this channel regularly and add a few extra premium add-ons to it (like the a custom domain name self hosted has but for an extra $5/mo) 4) Plugins to various other solutions for $49/piece. I know this is probably a side project, but you could turn this into a viable small business with an additional 1-2 developers. Conclusion: I'm totally buying it before you potentially take any of my advice ;)

hobs 10y ago
Whether or not you decide to follow this advice, its pretty good and based on a lot of lessons learned from dumb things others have done.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
You should write up a blog post with these and more stuff that works. Lots of OSS developers get overloaded on the projects and dont make money. A useful tool can use tactics like you describe to avoid that. I never thought of the payment processing trick. Good idea.
- jermaustin1 10y ago
  The things you learn making other people rich :) I was a product developer for 8 years. Developing tools in the SEO, Reputation Management and Email Marketing space. Eventually you find little tricks that just work across the board. Then I left that job for corporate america and I regret it every day.
  - jaggederest 10y ago
    You know you're not trapped. There's more than enough money to be made in that field if it's what you love.
    - jermaustin1 10y ago
      If you read the comments on my post (which reached all the way to #3 on HN!!!!!!) you will see why I left it. The job can suck you in trying to find little 1-2% optimizations here an there that are a little more black hat than you might want, but all playing on human psychology in a way that is exciting until you take a step back and reevaluate what you have been doing, then you feel sick to your stomach. At least, I did. It didn't help being in the SEO/SEM/IM/EM/AM space, so every customer was receiving nearly 0 value because they were too lazy to do the work and just wanted to get rich quick. I now work directly with our marketing team, but they hire out to vendors for the email marketing bits, the retargeting and ad spends. I just provide my 2 cents every now and then and go back to developing in house products.
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        So the stuff is happening anyway, you're supporting company ordering it, and feel better because you're not doing it directly? Sounds legit. :P You might be about staying away from that sort of thing on principle but there's another angle. Being the one making those decisions, you have the ability to reduce the short- and long-term harm they make by picking good strategies. Schemes in marketing and driving profit up are inevitable. What's not inevitable in general is inaccurate information, highly-biased profiling, products that don't work (or do harm), customers getting fewer products than they want, technological lock-in, and so on. Consider getting with the right companies pushing a collection of useful products or less harmful services vs other garbage on the market. Then all your schemes and optimizations would be benefiting people since the right companies would be benefiting. Companies you can vouch for. Best if they've been in business over a decade with good practices and/or are a non-profit with sustainable revenues. Just a thought.
porker 10y ago
> Include your own payment processor and accept payments on their behalf What's the benefit to the customer (and you) of this, vs letting them plug in their own Stripe account credentials (and handle chargebacks etc themselves)? I have a side project and we've let people enter their own details thinking it would be less hassle for us (customers: 3). Curious what I've missed..?
kennydude 10y ago
If you're including your own payment processor, work with Gocardless for UK/EU support too!

hobs 10y ago

Whether or not you decide to follow this advice, its pretty good and based on a lot of lessons learned from dumb things others have done.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

You should write up a blog post with these and more stuff that works. Lots of OSS developers get overloaded on the projects and dont make money. A useful tool can use tactics like you describe to avoid that. I never thought of the payment processing trick. Good idea.

jermaustin1 10y ago
The things you learn making other people rich :) I was a product developer for 8 years. Developing tools in the SEO, Reputation Management and Email Marketing space. Eventually you find little tricks that just work across the board. Then I left that job for corporate america and I regret it every day.
- jaggederest 10y ago
  You know you're not trapped. There's more than enough money to be made in that field if it's what you love.
  - jermaustin1 10y ago
    If you read the comments on my post (which reached all the way to #3 on HN!!!!!!) you will see why I left it. The job can suck you in trying to find little 1-2% optimizations here an there that are a little more black hat than you might want, but all playing on human psychology in a way that is exciting until you take a step back and reevaluate what you have been doing, then you feel sick to your stomach. At least, I did. It didn't help being in the SEO/SEM/IM/EM/AM space, so every customer was receiving nearly 0 value because they were too lazy to do the work and just wanted to get rich quick. I now work directly with our marketing team, but they hire out to vendors for the email marketing bits, the retargeting and ad spends. I just provide my 2 cents every now and then and go back to developing in house products.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      So the stuff is happening anyway, you're supporting company ordering it, and feel better because you're not doing it directly? Sounds legit. :P You might be about staying away from that sort of thing on principle but there's another angle. Being the one making those decisions, you have the ability to reduce the short- and long-term harm they make by picking good strategies. Schemes in marketing and driving profit up are inevitable. What's not inevitable in general is inaccurate information, highly-biased profiling, products that don't work (or do harm), customers getting fewer products than they want, technological lock-in, and so on. Consider getting with the right companies pushing a collection of useful products or less harmful services vs other garbage on the market. Then all your schemes and optimizations would be benefiting people since the right companies would be benefiting. Companies you can vouch for. Best if they've been in business over a decade with good practices and/or are a non-profit with sustainable revenues. Just a thought.

porker 10y ago

> Include your own payment processor and accept payments on their behalf What's the benefit to the customer (and you) of this, vs letting them plug in their own Stripe account credentials (and handle chargebacks etc themselves)? I have a side project and we've let people enter their own details thinking it would be less hassle for us (customers: 3). Curious what I've missed..?

kennydude 10y ago

If you're including your own payment processor, work with Gocardless for UK/EU support too!