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Comment by krmmalik | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand why so many products offer saas pricing when it is of no benefit to the consumer. I don't want to be paying $10/month for something I might only use a few times a year. Just let me pay as I go. I'm relieved to see that model here. Finally. I signed up and I hope other services will follow suit in the same way and relieve us of saas pricing fatigue.

Interestingly a startup I helped with some BI work, I advised then to change to a pay-as-you-go model instead of a monthly subscription and their sales revenue sky-rocketed.

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The counter-argument to that is that pay-per-use discourages usage: "every time you use it, you pay" encourages you to be mindful about how much you use. You may not binge entire series on Netflix if you have to pay for each episode. You may justify a Photoshop subscription so that you have a powerful tool ready whenever you need it, but maybe you would think twice about making a meme if you had to pay for it (with money not just time).

I think it really depends on usecase. For something like e-signature, I can totally see how "pay per signature" makes sense - you wouldn't sign less documents to save a buck! On the contrary, you'd be comfortable keeping a contract knowing you only pay what you use, if you don't sign documents in a month, you pay nothing. So here probably a "subscription" model is a much harder sell.

Also there is a difference at a firm level and an individual user. If I have a company where this is used all the time (real-estate agency, law firm, etc) I might want the all-you-can-eat subscription model and not worry about usage. In fact, I might buy extras like white-label branding.

But for personal use or occasional use, yeah, being limited to subscription plans really sucks.

I agree. It is dependent on use-case but the majority of startups backed by VC choose the SaaS pricing model by default.

I do agree that in the case of something like Netflix a monthly subscription is a good idea, but there are many instances where pay as you go can work so much better.

Most recent example of this for me was a faxing app. I needed to fax a handful of pages for the first (and probably only) time in years, and they wanted me to sign up for a monthly subscription.

I'm tired of modern "subscriptions everywhere" too, but OTOH SaaS is burning money even if nobody's using it at the moment. AWS doesn't care if EC2 instance is idling :-) That cost is either included in pay-as-you-go price, or paid as a subscription fee.

Don’t use ec2 then?

Would you mind sharing that startup you advised?

Viddyoze.com

Pay as you go doesn’t scale.

It’s chasing short term growth in lieu of long term stability.

Pay as you Go scales until there is enough loyalty and demand that your users opt for a monthly fee to save money. By forcing everyone to a monthly fee you alienate a ton of users that want to use your service but not enough to need a subscription.

Again this isn’t true.

Pay as you go is a terrible decision to make and you see you all the time you it’s VC backed startups.

They are often forced to revamp their offerings down the line to a monthly fee.

The only ones you alienate are penny pinching HN users.

I hope you are being sarcastic. I’ll give two examples: about twice a year I need to (a) send something for signature digitally or (b) send something digitally to a fax number. If I can pay $2-10 for this, I will in a heartbeat and move forward. But it seems every provider wants me to sign up for a monthly plan as if these irregular needs will magically become regular. So instead I waste a ton of time driving to the library to use their fax machine or mailing a paper copy of my signature to someone. I would rather pay a premium to use something every now and then, but I won’t agree to subscribe. If these ever became more than irregular needs I would gladly subscribe to get a lower price per use.

I bet there are orders of magnitude more users like me, the sum of which would be a sizeable market. But instead every SAAS provider is focused only on regular monthly users, ignoring this shadow market. But it is a false dichotomy. Make it highly profitable but not scalable to do Pay as you Go, and then less profitable but scalable to go monthly. Do both.

They need to charge enough per unit of service to make it worthwhile. And people need to understand that they need to pay for services. Not everything is free.

Subscriptions are a good model for things that you use often and regularly. PAYG is better for things that have high value when you need them, but you don't need often.

I can see services like this offering both, and customers choosing one or the other based on their usage pattern.

You see this with movies already, and I think it works well: You can subscribe to the monthly and watch whatever, whenever. Or just rent movies when you occasionally want to watch one. Both are cool.

Well, you can't have it. If I need a service once a year, I won't pay a monthly subscribtion.

Cloud providers are pay-as-you-go, and as far as I can tell, they scale!

Yes rip offs scale

Stop scamming people

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