Don't Charge $9 a Month for Your SaaS | Hacker News Reader

Don't Charge $9 a Month for Your SaaS

mojosaas.com

75 pointspvsukale39 comments

> Whereas previously it was tempting to look at my roadmap and think "what would people like me pay $9 for", now I am thinking more about what actual businesses would pay $50 to $100 a month for.

Two things have changed here. The $ amount, and the TARGET AUDIENCE. While the title suggests the article is about pricing, the text is about finding the right audience.

This is the first time I've heard of "Votemojo". My first reaction was, that's cool! I'd like to use that for some side projects I'm working on, but a single tool isn't worth $50. As a consumer, I'd expect it to deliver more than services I'm paying for such as Google Mail ($10/m), Adobe Photoshop ($20/m) or Dropbox ($12/m). It's fine to price out the consumer in favor of enterprise sales, but I'd be curious what the user demo breakdown is for a single tool.

Indie hackers may not be a sustainable market, but on the other hand, employees using your tool for hobby projects is a great way to backdoor yourself into the company. If you're going to start at a $49/mo plan, you may want to spend the effort to figure out what kind of basic cheap plan you can offer individual users such that only companies pay for the more expensive plan.

On the other hand, "your margin is my opportunity". Cost-plus pricing probably dissuades others from replicating the service and becoming competitors

Read this book to learn about "willingness to pay" https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Desig...

Sadly, I haven't seen anything literature on real value based pricing

I wish him good luck. Who's going to pay 50 USD a month to get website previews or a forums with votes though ? It looks like doable by (non SaaS) plugins for CMS

Let's price one of your engineers at $200k/year (ball park). 250 working days a year. So if your engineer spends 1 day cobbling something together, you could've paid for 16 months using this product.

That's not something your average person is going to pay $50/month for, but that price is just nothing to a decent sized company whose core competency isn't this exact product and it shouldn't be for a professional trying to run a business with actual revenue.

But those services would still be better integrated and cheaper with a plugin for a CMS

> Who's going to pay 50 USD a month to get website previews or a forums with votes though ?

Enough people that Canny is making $50k MRR for feature voting as a service. As of the time of this comment, their two tiers are $50/month or $200/month.

https://www.indiehackers.com/product/canny

As Patio11 mantracises, "charge more".

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