7 ms·

Your SaaS product is too cheap if you never lose customers because of pricing

142 points by SteliE 13y ago

iterable 13y ago
This is on point. Bjoern's Compass will hopefully allow us to set more market-driven pricing models.
- bjoernlasseh 13y ago
  Yes, among other things we benchmark your profit margin, ratio of CLV/CAC, Retention and Churn. Those indicators can help experiment on pricing more effectively.
  - shortsightedsid 13y ago
    Interesting. Can you share a link?
    - bjoernlasseh 13y ago
      compass.co
socksy 13y ago
What about price discrimination? Micro-economics 101 says using price discrimination is a good way to reduce consumer surplus, so a blanket "don't have low prices" is all very well, but you could have say, a small-business/home tier and get more money overall.
- SteliE 13y ago
  That's a good point and I'll go back and clarify in the post :) I do think you want multiple pricing tiers. The question here is what's your baseline? Most SaaS startups start way too low. And once they get even a little tiny bit of push back they go back to their pricing tiers and lower them again. That's a deadly pricing strategy and I wanted to call it out in this piece :)
welder 13y ago
Maybe mine is too expensive because I have a hard time gaining paid customers. (http://wakatime.com http://wakatime.com) btw, your blog post really hits the mark.
- SteliE 13y ago
  I would need to dig a bit deeper but on first sight $9/mo doesn't strike me as super expensive. Are you sure you're building something that fundamentally is valuable enough to an audience that is willing to pay money for it in exchange? Have you validated that that's true?
  - welder 13y ago
    You're right, I need to provide more value instead of lowering prices. I didn't validate the value before building, and justified it because I wanted to use it for myself. So I built a tool for myself and now let others use it.
    - kawera 13y ago
      It think it has a lot of value already but the landing page needs some caring (design, copy, typography), maybe a bit more assertive.
    - dhimes 13y ago
      Try this: for every feature listed, tell me why I want that. "Detects project name from repo- so your work is never XXX" "See logged time per project or branch- so you can see XXX" Then tell me why I want the investment: "If you value your time at $50/hr then for the price of 11 minutes you can save yourself hours of lost time each month" or whatever the selling point is. This will have three effects: It will make your pitch more compelling; it will force you to focus on selling the features that matter; and it will allow you to see the features you should add in order to have a more compelling sales pitch. If you are looking for something to duckduckgo, this is old news, and it comes down to "selling features vs selling benefits" in marketing.
    - 13y ago
richardwhiuk 13y ago
"We often advice SaaS startups to raise their prices." I don't normally pick people up on spelling, but that really grates - the word you want is advise.
- SteliE 13y ago
  Fixed! Thanks. You can tell I'm not a native speaker/writer. Making these kind of writing mistakes way too often (and some of them still show up even after having other look over it) :)
vonskippy 13y ago
I guess will see if that strategy works or not - Logmein will be a perfect case study. Years of free service - now its paid or use something else.
- Mandatum 13y ago
  I've only found large enterprise IT support and cold-callers from 'Microsoft' who are wanting to 'remove the virus from my machine' use LogMeIn. TeamViewer seems to be the flavour of choice.
kyberias 13y ago
The same also relates to poker: if your bluffs are never called, you're playing too tight.
tlb 13y ago
While the title sentence can be true under steady-state conditions, it's not true for virally growing startups. Growth depends on customers recommending the product to their friends. For example, if raising prices by 10% cuts your monthly viral spread coefficient by 10%, it will cut your market share by 90% after 22 months. (I'm working on a simulation engine for this kind of stuff.)
- TwoFactor 13y ago
  Yes, but market share isn't everything. If you're making 10% more per customer with 10% less customers, you're worrying about keeping less customers happy and can focus on making the smaller group even happier for ~ the same revenue. I'd be interested in seeing your simulation if you decide to make it available.
- jcampbell1 13y ago
  The opposite is true for normal startups. Unless you drop the price to zero, the viral coefficient goes up with price. The people willing to pay the most are the most likely to spread the word. You will have fewer customers at a higher price, but the likelihood any given customer will spread the word is higher because you are solving a more important problem for them and they are more committed to the product.
- applecore 13y ago
  If your SaaS startup meaningfully depends on viral growth, and a plan that's 10% cheaper has an effect on it, you'll almost always do far better with a freemium business model. It's hard to recommend freemium for most SaaS startups since it depends critically on having a huge potential market and a zero-cost avenue for growth within it.
- roel_v 13y ago
  "(I'm working on a simulation engine for this kind of stuff.)" How do you calibrate it for a specific market?
  - tlb 13y ago
    There's no silver bullet. Version 1 will at least let you capture your assumptions about how you think your market works and how your product will get traction in it. As you gain experience in the market, you'll be able to refine the model and make better comparisons among alternative growth strategies. Eventually I'll try to curate a library of market models and startup plans that did or didn't work in them.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- runako 13y ago
  If you are not exchanging money for a product/service, you are not the customer (you are the product), and this doesn't apply. A better analogy for Google would be to model what would happen to Google's revenues if they added a $0.01 surcharge to every AdWords order.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - runako 13y ago
      I'm in violent agreement with this: >> you're still a consumer But I (and the OP, to my read) meant "customer" instead. That takes nothing away from the quality of service being provided, etc. (although good luck getting support from the vendor if you have a problem with e.g. Gmail or Google search). But it is kind of silly to talk about pricing for a service like search that is provided free to its users. In discussing monetization, the difference between the "consumer" and "customer" obviously matters.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Google searches aren't really a product with a zero dollar price; they are a payment to the suppliers of advertising views. charging for them is, de facto, cutting the price Google pays to the suppliers of the main product it sells, rather than a price increase on a product it sells.
yeukhon 13y ago
I find this really interesting. On one hand EC2 performance sucks to the bottom if you are running on the t1.micro instance (I have tried above medium once and it wasn't much better either). DO (https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/) really catches my eyes. The whole "SSD", "512MB" at $5 per month is a bargain. If you are running low traffic website (assuming you will not post your article on HN yourself), $5 per month is absolutely enough for personal blog. If you run a Persona IdB that way, it's only $60 + $50 (an IO domain can be as cheap as that plus tax on gandi, which comes with 1 year of SSL/TLS cert). I really wonder how much profit they can make out of this kind of bargain. 1. maintenance cost is high 2. staff cost is high 3. disk failure is frequent 4. power usage is high
- stanmancan 13y ago
  You can configure a $5/m DO instance to handle the front page of HN if you know what you're doing.
the_bear 13y ago
Almost all conversations about pricing make the same mistake: they assume that we all have the same goals. Your goal might be to squeeze as much money out of your customers as you can. That's totally fine, and completely ethical, but it's not my goal. I'm guessing many people are similar to me. I want my business to be profitable. I want to get rich off of it. But I want my customers to get even richer. I want to know for a fact that I'm leaving money on the table for my customers to capture for themselves. I suspect that in the long run this will actually be a good business decision (happier customers now = more word of mouth) but even if it isn't, I still think it's the right decision for me. That's why I don't raise my prices.
- SteliE 13y ago
  I hear you. What I'm saying is not "leave zero customer surplus" I say don't create value purely by lowering prices. More specifically from the post: "Focus fanatically on this: offering more value to every single customer than you extract from them with your pricing. Do that by constantly adding more value to your customers life instead of lowering your prices and discounting your product heavily."
  - jandrese 13y ago
    Isn't this the road to expensive bloated products full of feature that few people need? I know I get annoyed when some well designed tool adds a ton of features that don't really make it any better for me, and becomes more expensive in the process. Heck, it often becomes worse overall because all of those extra features make it slow and buggy.
    - gacba 13y ago
      If you are adding features for features' sake, then you are not adding value. Bloated products result when you add features without understanding their value to the customer base you serve. Of course, it could be that you serve such a diverse customer base that adding in "valuable" features creates bloat as a side-effect (Hi Microsoft Excel!), but for a SaaS app that is less than 3-5 years old, I think you'd be hard pressed to fit in this category.
BlackDeath3 13y ago
Good old Rollercoaster Tycoon economics! "Your guests are commenting that the park entrance fee is very cheap, maybe you should consider raising the price!"
rglover 13y ago
I ran into the "your product is too expensive" recently, which in turn also led me to find out that my pricing model was all wrong (I target freelancers and usage of my product is limited enough that it doesn't make sense to have a monthly plan). To a degree I'll be lowering my prices based on customer feedback, but also because the goal is to meet the customer's reality (not just my own). I think this is important for a lot of new SaaS businesses to consider as we move to a more niche-based market: is my offering matched to my customers reality? A friend shared a nice little anecdote about this the other day: https://soundcloud.com/khuram-malik-3/pricing-by-peter-drucker https://soundcloud.com/khuram-malik-3/pricing-by-peter-druck...
- lucaspiller 13y ago
  I think one of the problems with building software for freelancers is you are targeting both $5/hour Elance and $100/hour 'ninja' workers. In the case of Proper (nice landing page btw!) both may have the same usage but will get a different value out of it - meaning you can't charge them both the same price. One way you could get around that in you product offerings is to offer more features in the higher plans than just more usage.
sigil 13y ago
"A high price point is a bounty on your head" -- a serial entrepreneur friend of mine. As SaaS businesses, our fear is that all this uncaptured downmarket demand will create a competitor where none may even exist currently. These potential competitors also have an advantage. You've proven the market for them, and they can expend fewer cycles building their SaaS by simply copying the useful features you've already built. We all know the standard advice here. Find those features or capabilities that don't provide much value to these downmarket customers, then introduce lower price points with pared-down versions of your SaaS. But this article suggests another approach, and I like it: instead of paring down features, find out what potentially new features add value for your downmarket customers. Build them. Bring their value received up to your price point, instead of bringing your price down to their value. This may be hard to do in practice, but it's an interesting idea.
- tomrod 13y ago
  Absolutely. Finding that sweet spot in pricing is essential. One issue I find is when people don't differentiate _enough_. For example--I may have a blackboard killer CMS, but if I don't have any kind of differentiation from blackboard, I'm only competing on price. And, if I introduce new features but never show HOW these help the consumer, they won't value it.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jtheory 13y ago
This isn't wrong per se, but it doesn't feel like solid advice to me; I think it's just skipping past a lot of nuances that are really pretty important. Like: extracting the maximum possible money out of your customers is kind of a shitty goal for a business, as they go. It's not exactly pushed here, either, but it's not identified and discarded. There's a price point where customers will be feeling pained and possibly taken advantage of, but still recognize the value of the product to them is such that they will still pay. This is not a sweet spot, I think; it's an opportunity for your competitors. Hustling to add value instead of cutting prices is a good point, but "how do we change our product to add more value to our customers?" is a non-trivial question, though. The default gut responses are usually wrong, and end up increasing value to some customers at a cost to others; more features but severely increased complexity; sometimes broadening the potential target market at the cost of lower value (or a steeper learning curve) for the current user base. Finally: customers even in a fairly narrow niche are diverse. You may settle on pricing that works great for healthy businesses, but which will force struggling businesses to reluctantly forgo your service, even when they need it the most. A business relationship is a relationship between people or groups thereof, in the end, even if a numbers game is involved to maintain business health.
davmar 13y ago
i've read a number of comments here who think the goal is to "extract the max dollar figure from customers". and they make that sound so negative. well, the truth is that with that extra money, we hire engineers to improve our software faster so that we can deliver more value to our customers and be more competitive in the marketplace. our customers need to give us money to keep us in business and so that we continue to add value. if i took the least amount of money from them, i'd be doing them a disservice because they'd adopt my products, i'd fail them after a few years due to a lack of innovation, and then they'd be forced to go through a painful switch to a new platform. so yes, we do want the max amount of revenue. we want it so that we're paid and satisfied, so we can hire more engineers and acquire more customers, and give them the value and innovation they need over they years.
cdelsolar 13y ago
My company's product is by a fairly significant margin the most expensive out of the competition, and we've refused to budge -- and I'm fairly certain the company wouldn't be alive and growing if we'd started out with lower pricing. It's also somewhat satisfying to see the competition slowly raise their prices. And yes, the hardest part that we are constantly working on is raising the value.
Ryel 13y ago
The title of this post should be Adobe's slogan. Here's an example... If I call AT&T right now, or my cable company and say that I want to cancel service to switch to a cheaper company, all of a sudden they will offer me a lower price to keep me from leaving. The ol' a customer is cheaper to keep than to acquire mantra I suppose... What these people (and you) don't understand is that if you (or AT&T) called me out of the blue and said, hello sir, we've noticed that today makes your 5th year as an AT&T customer, we'd like to take $50 off your bill every month from now on(which is the offer they give me when I threaten to leave) I would be ecstatic. - As a satisfied customer I would be shouting your name from the mountain top.
- sjg007 13y ago
  I wonder if it would work. Rather than 2 year discount upfront, do it on the back.
Fasebook 13y ago
Jew the Jews before the Jews Jew Joo.
farseer 13y ago
wow! you are charging $59/user/month for a contacts app. Good luck with that.

142 points by SteliE 13y ago

iterable 13y ago

This is on point. Bjoern's Compass will hopefully allow us to set more market-driven pricing models.

bjoernlasseh 13y ago
Yes, among other things we benchmark your profit margin, ratio of CLV/CAC, Retention and Churn. Those indicators can help experiment on pricing more effectively.
- shortsightedsid 13y ago
  Interesting. Can you share a link?
  - bjoernlasseh 13y ago
    compass.co

socksy 13y ago

What about price discrimination? Micro-economics 101 says using price discrimination is a good way to reduce consumer surplus, so a blanket "don't have low prices" is all very well, but you could have say, a small-business/home tier and get more money overall.

SteliE 13y ago
That's a good point and I'll go back and clarify in the post :) I do think you want multiple pricing tiers. The question here is what's your baseline? Most SaaS startups start way too low. And once they get even a little tiny bit of push back they go back to their pricing tiers and lower them again. That's a deadly pricing strategy and I wanted to call it out in this piece :)

welder 13y ago

Maybe mine is too expensive because I have a hard time gaining paid customers. (http://wakatime.com http://wakatime.com) btw, your blog post really hits the mark.

SteliE 13y ago
I would need to dig a bit deeper but on first sight $9/mo doesn't strike me as super expensive. Are you sure you're building something that fundamentally is valuable enough to an audience that is willing to pay money for it in exchange? Have you validated that that's true?
- welder 13y ago
  You're right, I need to provide more value instead of lowering prices. I didn't validate the value before building, and justified it because I wanted to use it for myself. So I built a tool for myself and now let others use it.
  - kawera 13y ago
    It think it has a lot of value already but the landing page needs some caring (design, copy, typography), maybe a bit more assertive.
  - dhimes 13y ago
    Try this: for every feature listed, tell me why I want that. "Detects project name from repo- so your work is never XXX" "See logged time per project or branch- so you can see XXX" Then tell me why I want the investment: "If you value your time at $50/hr then for the price of 11 minutes you can save yourself hours of lost time each month" or whatever the selling point is. This will have three effects: It will make your pitch more compelling; it will force you to focus on selling the features that matter; and it will allow you to see the features you should add in order to have a more compelling sales pitch. If you are looking for something to duckduckgo, this is old news, and it comes down to "selling features vs selling benefits" in marketing.
  - 13y ago

richardwhiuk 13y ago

"We often advice SaaS startups to raise their prices." I don't normally pick people up on spelling, but that really grates - the word you want is advise.

SteliE 13y ago
Fixed! Thanks. You can tell I'm not a native speaker/writer. Making these kind of writing mistakes way too often (and some of them still show up even after having other look over it) :)

vonskippy 13y ago

I guess will see if that strategy works or not - Logmein will be a perfect case study. Years of free service - now its paid or use something else.

Mandatum 13y ago
I've only found large enterprise IT support and cold-callers from 'Microsoft' who are wanting to 'remove the virus from my machine' use LogMeIn. TeamViewer seems to be the flavour of choice.

kyberias 13y ago

The same also relates to poker: if your bluffs are never called, you're playing too tight.

tlb 13y ago

While the title sentence can be true under steady-state conditions, it's not true for virally growing startups. Growth depends on customers recommending the product to their friends. For example, if raising prices by 10% cuts your monthly viral spread coefficient by 10%, it will cut your market share by 90% after 22 months. (I'm working on a simulation engine for this kind of stuff.)

TwoFactor 13y ago
Yes, but market share isn't everything. If you're making 10% more per customer with 10% less customers, you're worrying about keeping less customers happy and can focus on making the smaller group even happier for ~ the same revenue. I'd be interested in seeing your simulation if you decide to make it available.
jcampbell1 13y ago
The opposite is true for normal startups. Unless you drop the price to zero, the viral coefficient goes up with price. The people willing to pay the most are the most likely to spread the word. You will have fewer customers at a higher price, but the likelihood any given customer will spread the word is higher because you are solving a more important problem for them and they are more committed to the product.
applecore 13y ago
If your SaaS startup meaningfully depends on viral growth, and a plan that's 10% cheaper has an effect on it, you'll almost always do far better with a freemium business model. It's hard to recommend freemium for most SaaS startups since it depends critically on having a huge potential market and a zero-cost avenue for growth within it.
roel_v 13y ago
"(I'm working on a simulation engine for this kind of stuff.)" How do you calibrate it for a specific market?
- tlb 13y ago
  There's no silver bullet. Version 1 will at least let you capture your assumptions about how you think your market works and how your product will get traction in it. As you gain experience in the market, you'll be able to refine the model and make better comparisons among alternative growth strategies. Eventually I'll try to curate a library of market models and startup plans that did or didn't work in them.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

runako 13y ago
If you are not exchanging money for a product/service, you are not the customer (you are the product), and this doesn't apply. A better analogy for Google would be to model what would happen to Google's revenues if they added a $0.01 surcharge to every AdWords order.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - runako 13y ago
    I'm in violent agreement with this: >> you're still a consumer But I (and the OP, to my read) meant "customer" instead. That takes nothing away from the quality of service being provided, etc. (although good luck getting support from the vendor if you have a problem with e.g. Gmail or Google search). But it is kind of silly to talk about pricing for a service like search that is provided free to its users. In discussing monetization, the difference between the "consumer" and "customer" obviously matters.
dragonwriter 13y ago
Google searches aren't really a product with a zero dollar price; they are a payment to the suppliers of advertising views. charging for them is, de facto, cutting the price Google pays to the suppliers of the main product it sells, rather than a price increase on a product it sells.

yeukhon 13y ago

I find this really interesting. On one hand EC2 performance sucks to the bottom if you are running on the t1.micro instance (I have tried above medium once and it wasn't much better either). DO (https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/) really catches my eyes. The whole "SSD", "512MB" at $5 per month is a bargain. If you are running low traffic website (assuming you will not post your article on HN yourself), $5 per month is absolutely enough for personal blog. If you run a Persona IdB that way, it's only $60 + $50 (an IO domain can be as cheap as that plus tax on gandi, which comes with 1 year of SSL/TLS cert). I really wonder how much profit they can make out of this kind of bargain. 1. maintenance cost is high 2. staff cost is high 3. disk failure is frequent 4. power usage is high

stanmancan 13y ago
You can configure a $5/m DO instance to handle the front page of HN if you know what you're doing.

the_bear 13y ago

Almost all conversations about pricing make the same mistake: they assume that we all have the same goals. Your goal might be to squeeze as much money out of your customers as you can. That's totally fine, and completely ethical, but it's not my goal. I'm guessing many people are similar to me. I want my business to be profitable. I want to get rich off of it. But I want my customers to get even richer. I want to know for a fact that I'm leaving money on the table for my customers to capture for themselves. I suspect that in the long run this will actually be a good business decision (happier customers now = more word of mouth) but even if it isn't, I still think it's the right decision for me. That's why I don't raise my prices.

SteliE 13y ago
I hear you. What I'm saying is not "leave zero customer surplus" I say don't create value purely by lowering prices. More specifically from the post: "Focus fanatically on this: offering more value to every single customer than you extract from them with your pricing. Do that by constantly adding more value to your customers life instead of lowering your prices and discounting your product heavily."
- jandrese 13y ago
  Isn't this the road to expensive bloated products full of feature that few people need? I know I get annoyed when some well designed tool adds a ton of features that don't really make it any better for me, and becomes more expensive in the process. Heck, it often becomes worse overall because all of those extra features make it slow and buggy.
  - gacba 13y ago
    If you are adding features for features' sake, then you are not adding value. Bloated products result when you add features without understanding their value to the customer base you serve. Of course, it could be that you serve such a diverse customer base that adding in "valuable" features creates bloat as a side-effect (Hi Microsoft Excel!), but for a SaaS app that is less than 3-5 years old, I think you'd be hard pressed to fit in this category.

BlackDeath3 13y ago

Good old Rollercoaster Tycoon economics! "Your guests are commenting that the park entrance fee is very cheap, maybe you should consider raising the price!"

rglover 13y ago

I ran into the "your product is too expensive" recently, which in turn also led me to find out that my pricing model was all wrong (I target freelancers and usage of my product is limited enough that it doesn't make sense to have a monthly plan). To a degree I'll be lowering my prices based on customer feedback, but also because the goal is to meet the customer's reality (not just my own). I think this is important for a lot of new SaaS businesses to consider as we move to a more niche-based market: is my offering matched to my customers reality? A friend shared a nice little anecdote about this the other day: https://soundcloud.com/khuram-malik-3/pricing-by-peter-drucker https://soundcloud.com/khuram-malik-3/pricing-by-peter-druck...

lucaspiller 13y ago
I think one of the problems with building software for freelancers is you are targeting both $5/hour Elance and $100/hour 'ninja' workers. In the case of Proper (nice landing page btw!) both may have the same usage but will get a different value out of it - meaning you can't charge them both the same price. One way you could get around that in you product offerings is to offer more features in the higher plans than just more usage.

sigil 13y ago

"A high price point is a bounty on your head" -- a serial entrepreneur friend of mine. As SaaS businesses, our fear is that all this uncaptured downmarket demand will create a competitor where none may even exist currently. These potential competitors also have an advantage. You've proven the market for them, and they can expend fewer cycles building their SaaS by simply copying the useful features you've already built. We all know the standard advice here. Find those features or capabilities that don't provide much value to these downmarket customers, then introduce lower price points with pared-down versions of your SaaS. But this article suggests another approach, and I like it: instead of paring down features, find out what potentially new features add value for your downmarket customers. Build them. Bring their value received up to your price point, instead of bringing your price down to their value. This may be hard to do in practice, but it's an interesting idea.

tomrod 13y ago
Absolutely. Finding that sweet spot in pricing is essential. One issue I find is when people don't differentiate _enough_. For example--I may have a blackboard killer CMS, but if I don't have any kind of differentiation from blackboard, I'm only competing on price. And, if I introduce new features but never show HOW these help the consumer, they won't value it.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jtheory 13y ago

This isn't wrong per se, but it doesn't feel like solid advice to me; I think it's just skipping past a lot of nuances that are really pretty important. Like: extracting the maximum possible money out of your customers is kind of a shitty goal for a business, as they go. It's not exactly pushed here, either, but it's not identified and discarded. There's a price point where customers will be feeling pained and possibly taken advantage of, but still recognize the value of the product to them is such that they will still pay. This is not a sweet spot, I think; it's an opportunity for your competitors. Hustling to add value instead of cutting prices is a good point, but "how do we change our product to add more value to our customers?" is a non-trivial question, though. The default gut responses are usually wrong, and end up increasing value to some customers at a cost to others; more features but severely increased complexity; sometimes broadening the potential target market at the cost of lower value (or a steeper learning curve) for the current user base. Finally: customers even in a fairly narrow niche are diverse. You may settle on pricing that works great for healthy businesses, but which will force struggling businesses to reluctantly forgo your service, even when they need it the most. A business relationship is a relationship between people or groups thereof, in the end, even if a numbers game is involved to maintain business health.

davmar 13y ago

i've read a number of comments here who think the goal is to "extract the max dollar figure from customers". and they make that sound so negative. well, the truth is that with that extra money, we hire engineers to improve our software faster so that we can deliver more value to our customers and be more competitive in the marketplace. our customers need to give us money to keep us in business and so that we continue to add value. if i took the least amount of money from them, i'd be doing them a disservice because they'd adopt my products, i'd fail them after a few years due to a lack of innovation, and then they'd be forced to go through a painful switch to a new platform. so yes, we do want the max amount of revenue. we want it so that we're paid and satisfied, so we can hire more engineers and acquire more customers, and give them the value and innovation they need over they years.

cdelsolar 13y ago

My company's product is by a fairly significant margin the most expensive out of the competition, and we've refused to budge -- and I'm fairly certain the company wouldn't be alive and growing if we'd started out with lower pricing. It's also somewhat satisfying to see the competition slowly raise their prices. And yes, the hardest part that we are constantly working on is raising the value.

Ryel 13y ago

The title of this post should be Adobe's slogan. Here's an example... If I call AT&T right now, or my cable company and say that I want to cancel service to switch to a cheaper company, all of a sudden they will offer me a lower price to keep me from leaving. The ol' a customer is cheaper to keep than to acquire mantra I suppose... What these people (and you) don't understand is that if you (or AT&T) called me out of the blue and said, hello sir, we've noticed that today makes your 5th year as an AT&T customer, we'd like to take $50 off your bill every month from now on(which is the offer they give me when I threaten to leave) I would be ecstatic. - As a satisfied customer I would be shouting your name from the mountain top.

sjg007 13y ago
I wonder if it would work. Rather than 2 year discount upfront, do it on the back.

Fasebook 13y ago

Jew the Jews before the Jews Jew Joo.

farseer 13y ago

wow! you are charging $59/user/month for a contacts app. Good luck with that.