Ask HN: People selling both SaaS and on-prem, what's the price difference? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: People selling both SaaS and on-prem, what's the price difference?

8 points_false8 comments

I'm curious to get a sense of the relative price difference for the same software when sold as SAAS and on-prem. DevOps tools are the most relevant here, but I'd be curious about any pricing comparisons.

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My company has 3 offerings:

- Cloud SaaS: limited free tier, standard tiers $49-799/mo, enterprise tiers $15,990+/yr.

- On-prem CE: free, limited feature set, no support guarantees.

- On-prem EE: $9,990/yr, additional features, dedicated support.

Interesting to see that on-prem starts lower than enterprise tier. What's the reason for that, as I'd assume any on prem would be more costly to provide?

It's less expensive because it's actually less costly for me to support on-prem vs cloud, so I want to incentivize on-prem when possible. I also don't want to price out non-enterprises (i.e. those on the standard cloud tiers). So it's a balancing act between standard and enterprise pricing, and so far the current pricing is working well for both.

Why do you think on-prem would be more costly than cloud? Just curious.

I assume the extra hoops for when you need to support 'the thing'. When you host 'the thing' you are fully aware of OS, versions, updates/upgrades/patches (both functional and security), you are aware of the number of users, Profiles (they didn't go on to create the profile PizzaAuditorBurger with FULL-ADMIN-on-the-whole-Galaxy and at the same time disable every audit log ever made).

Basically it's about control.

Depending on the client and the type of SaaS you are offering it may create the headache for a SOC2/PCI-DSS compliance/HIPAA/etc reports/compliance/etc. While if they host it, then it's their problem :)

So.. Cloud.. you got headaches but control the narrative, version, etc. On-prem.. they got headaches but you can charge them more hours when supporting.

(I once worked on a Programme for a mega-big company that was closing down its data centers and moving assets on a managed private cloud - I was the Compliance Lead for that project)(it involved SOX, GDPR, and the promise of 2700x)(together with the mandatory updates because some on-prem apps haven't been updated for YEARS and were still running on Win2000)(which Win2000 have the most beautiful desktop background color ever-ever-ever)(but still.. we're talking that this happened after 2015)

EDIT: Also.. if anyone is looking to hide someone in Europe to run their SOX, GRC, Internal Controls Monitoring.. I am looking (and I know the tricks to get compliance actually happen - with minimal pain)

Granted I haven't been offering a self-hosted option for that long, but I feel like Docker makes a lot of these things moot. If a customer fails to upgrade, that's on them and can potentially lead to a loss of support if they fall out of LTS.

Apart from the support, onprem is basically free as no infra costs. Why would it be more costly?

Tools in my space are usually 5-10x.

Letting people be on-prem kills your upside for NRR. You need to have something compensating.

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