Interesting discussion. Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. I saw one comment (#16) saying that SaaS vendors have the ability to charge by us

Interesting discussion. Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. I saw one comment (#16) saying that SaaS vendors have the ability to charge by usage and should do so because companies wants to see the link between what they pay and what they use/get. But that doesn't work for all products. Charging per usage can mean these two things: 1. The final cost might be hard to evaluate and can get out of hand. Some companies don't want that and want to be able to know in advance exactly how much it will cost. 2. It might tend to limit the usage of the software because you don't want to upgrade if you can get by with what you have. But I'm not saying charging per usage is not good! I'm trying to point out that you need to look at the problem from different points of view (value you bring, your costs, etc.) and see what works best in your case. Not everybody can charge depending on what costs them either. Many web-apps don't cost much to operate (if it's mostly displaying pages), so bandwidth costs wouldn't be enough. Is it easy to give a price to the value you give to your customers? If you can say "it saves you that much time vs. what you have right now", it's easier than for "make your customers happier thanks to a better service". Is there a metric that would make sense to charge for? Is that metric easy to grasp by your customers? I'm thinking of how Apple markets the sizes for iPod: by songs. 8GB might be obscure but 2000 songs is much easier: I know what a song is (about 3 minutes) and I can easily know how many I already have.