Per Seat Pricing Sucks | Hacker News Reader

Per Seat Pricing Sucks

blog.flippercloud.io

19 pointsmscccc10 comments

Tiers based on seats doesn't seem all that different. Flipper Cloud seems to be roughly $60/seat/yr but only buyable in fixed chunks, meaning some pay as much as $499/yr for 1 seat, others pay $50/seat for 10 seats, others pay $136/seat for 11 seats, etc.

So now, as a business with 10 users, I still have to decide if my 11th new employee is worth $1000/yr for their seat, if I should kick someone else off and give it to the new employee, etc...

Correct there are some limits still. At some point you have to make a decision, but at least not with every seat. The hope is to keep increasing those limits.

There has to be some sort of limit because "unlimited" can easily lead to customers using far more resources than they're paying for.

However, by moving away from per-seat pricing, customers who have switched to the new pricing have now added many more users who can benefit from having access to the Flipper Cloud UI but were not worth paying for individual seats before.

So based on customer behavior and reception to the new plans, it has made things much more flexible for them in practice.

I don't know, it seems like a pretty good way to price things. Yes, you have to consider if you want to pay for each user you give access to. But the point is usually that giving someone access is the value of the product to you. Plus, costs tend to scale by seat. A major cost is support rather than data or load.

What would suck more than per seat is dividing cost+profit over all customers equally and ending up needing to charge a huge amount for anyone to access with unlimited users. Also bad is going under by not having a sustainable business.

To summarize:

(1) For most user facing products, the value is user access, so that's what you pay for. (2) Costs scale by seat due to increased complexity and support.

I do not know Flipper Cloud - but the founder's focus seems right on the money for me. You want your customers to love using your product. This focus on making the product "lovable"/adored by customers is right on the money for me...

I wish them well (and I wish they do not change their focus.)

I'm the founder. Appreciate it.

Pricing is hard, no question about it.

One solution to the “not all users are equal” problem is to create different types of users and price accordingly. That’s what we’re doing, and it’s working out well so far. It depends on the product and use case, of course.

Glad different types of seats is working for you!

We started down that path with free billing seats. But in the end, per seat just never felt right.

As a business owner (I have some other companies) my favorite software to pay for was everything that didn't charge per seat. I'd like my own software to be the same and thus the change.

It still creates non-trivial day-to-day overhead for customers where they now have to think about who to invite and what permissions to grant them in conjunction with costs.

We'd much rather that 90% of the cases, customers can just invite anyone on their team without fearing ballooning costs. Then they can think about permissions purely from a permissions/access perspective and not have to factor cost into that decision.

Per seats sucks. Per login with unlimited users is at least a bit more fair

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