> What are the downsides of this from the business perspective? I can’t answer for the specific service you’re thinking of, but I can answer for the general Sa

> What are the downsides of this from the business perspective? I can’t answer for the specific service you’re thinking of, but I can answer for the general SaaS case. Even assuming the service has a meter-able metric, there’s two big problems: 1. Often, the cost to provide the service is not linear with usage. One moderately complex support ticket might cost the vendor more than the variable cost to handle a small customer’s usage for a whole year. Imagine a new customer needs a support ticket or has a pre-sales product question, then only uses $5 of services in the next year. Of course, there are ways to address this - charge for support, charge a monthly minimum - but these have other tradeoffs. 2. The value received by the customer is almost never linear with usage. If a customer needs to send one e-fax a month, it’s worth more than $0.50 to them, even though a customer who sends 200 faxes per month might only pay $0.50 [1]. This also extends to competition. A customer doing a very low volume of something is comparing the price to a different alternative than someone doing a larger volume of it. At very low volume, the competition might be driving to a print/copy store (and wasting $5 or even $20 worth of time). At 200 faxes, the competition might be a $200 fax machine. A vendor could address this with per-unit pricing discounts, but the scale can look offensive: $5 for your first fax, $2.50 each for your next 5, $1 each for the next 10, $0.50 for the rest. In a sense, a small SaaS plan includes enough units that the effective per-unit price is at least reasonably comparable with larger plans, and not offensive. In the example above, a plan with 5 faxes for $10/month doesn’t mean you’d be able to buy qty 1 for $2. [1]: All prices are imaginary. I haven’t sent a fax in ages.