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Comment by saasbuyer | Hacker News Reader

1. The subscription price is tied to headcount. If you're below 100 employees, we charge $2k per month and it scales up based on # of employees. We tied pricing to headcount because it is a solid indicator of quantity of products and total $ spend. At these levels, we are to maintain a positive ROI. I'm open to suggestions and improvements with the pricing model!

2. Our sweet-spot is SaaS but we are testing non-SaaS purchases. As an example, we recently helped one of our customers save a bunch of money on their SOC 2 audit fees. Do you have specific non-SaaS purchases in mind?

Also, within our customer base, there is significant overlap in products. Meaning, most companies use G-Suite, Slack, Sfx, and others. So, we've learned how to buy those products efficiently and have a good understanding of what it should cost. This saves everyone's time (including the salespersons).

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Thanks for additional info.

As far as the pricing model, what you say makes sense for larger companies. I'm thinking of small companies, say 10-20 people. Big enough that they do have some purchasing pain, but not $2k/month worth of it. Setting a low price point for them might get growing companies on board early, becoming larger clients as they grew.

For non-SaaS, I didn't have anything specific in mind. I know that my teams have purchased, at various times, IDE licenses, "Pro" versions of various libraries and tool, and even licenses to run various servers that aren't free/open source. The catch in my mind is that if "procurement-as-a-service" covers all my bases, it may make sense. But if I need an internal procurement person anyway, the value prop of your service diminishes a bit.

I like the idea overall. I'm a believer in hiring for the core product, and outsourcing the rest, and this idea fits in nicely with that philosophy.

Today, we aren't built for 10-20 person companies, but it is definitely top of mind. We are working on productizing some of our knowledge to solve for this use case, but we aren't there yet.

In terms of non-SaaS, yes, we could handle those examples. But, we don't do your cable bill and things like that. Technology procurement, yes.

Do 10-20 person companies generally have the same purchasing pain? I mean, small purchases (no matter if licenses or saas or whatever) are done with off-the-shelf prices, you pick out a plan and just buy it; you're not going to have the time-consuming enterprise sales dance with vendors refusing to name a price until they've had a sales team visit you in person to give a demo and negotiate a custom deal etc - that kind of high-touch sales inevitably requires the price to be large, and if you're not paying these large prices, then you aren't going through all this interaction with vendors and you simply don't have the problem that Vendr is solving.

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