Ask HN: Usage-based pricing vs. tiered-pricing (SaaS)
Background: when looking at SaaS products with a clear utility metric (e.g. # of API requests) many companies still do not provide pure usage based pricing á la ___ price = price per request * requests ___ but price in tiers (e.g. 10000 requests). Their tiers do not really segment users based on enterprisy feature like SSO but mainly focus on # of requests. I have personally paid for some of these services and it always bugged me that I only need say 500 requests per month but get charged for 10k.
On the other hand I suspect there are also good arguments to be made for tiered pricing especially since I don't have experience as a buyer of software inside large companies.
Would really appreciate input from 1) folks building SaaS having experimented with this 2) folks in large orgs buying software 3) buyers/users of software in general and how they feel about pure usage based pricing
Thanks so much everyone!