4 ms·
Ask HN: Annual or Monthly billing, which is better?
Anyone tested the two models? Which one has worked well for your project?
- hekker 9y agoNot tested them both: I work with annual billing for my SaaS. The pricing page shows monthly prices, which works well for me. Customers buy a contract for a year which they can cancel at any moment. Obviously the remaining months within that contract year will not be refunded. Note that the SaaS is only 300 euros a year so your mileage may vary. (B2B market)
- yulaow 9y agomonthly billing + annual fairly discounted billing without refund in case of cancellation.
- carlmungz 9y agoAnnual billing works for my model because my users will not be making enough frequent purchases to justify a monthly fee (which is what I initially started with). I provide actionable information which they can use once, twice or more times a year.
- clientelle 9y agoLove to see how you present the pricing, have a link?
- carlmungz 9y agohttps://citybreakflights.com https://citybreakflights.com
- shoo 9y agoThere's quite a bit of relevant stuff in this talk by Jason Cohen -- 'Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business': https://vimeo.com/74338272 https://vimeo.com/74338272
- saluki 9y agoWe offer both, about 20% subscribe to annual plan. It's pretty common for SaaS to offer a monthly plan and an annual plan for each tier that is 10 x Monthly cost so users get 2 months free paying annually.
- kidlogic 9y agoannual billing, period. being able to access a year's worth of capital upfront will always be better (from the providers point-of-view)
- skdotdan 9y agoCould you expand on that?
- dyeje 9y agoIt's better to have money now rather than later.
- jasonkester 9y agoNot always. Personally, I find annual billing a bit annoying to deal with because it introduces spikiness into our monthly revenue numbers. Whereas before I could tell you roughly what we'd bring in each month (by looking at the previous month and adding a bit), now it can vary by a few thousand dollars depending on where our Annual subscribers land in the year. In the long term, it's probably better for the business, since it bumps Lifetime Value up a bit for those customers. But I'd actually prefer it if nobody took advantage of it, so that I could have a nice smooth revenue chart to look at.
- paulmatthijs 9y agoAnnual, although I'd like to see some real life high volume SaaS numbers on churn comparing the two. We do non-recurring monthly and recurring annual as a in-between solution.