Announcing our pricing (including consulting rates) | Hacker News Reader

Announcing our pricing (including consulting rates)

keen.io

31 pointsdorkitude29 comments

The ramp from free to paying customer is too high. Either remove the free plan or add a lower bracket. The way you priced things is cute, but shows that these are numbers that you made up. People might look at them and question you, your business, and the value you provide. The standard pricing model [1] works. Stick to it.

[1] - Use .99, .97, or .95 instead of whole numbers. Use odd numbers. Example: 127.99 or 129.99 for your lowest plan.

.99 is for regular prices. .97 is for lowered prices (but still considered regular). .95 is for promotional prices. Special prices may include either, but are ruled by different pricing options.

Edit:

Don't take my word for it and test it.

> The way you priced things is cute, but shows that these are numbers that you made up

What it sounds like you're driving toward is better documenting the rationale behind the cost. To my untrained eye, the costs scaled with usage in a fairly familiar pattern.

What would you do to better illustrate the logic behind a pricing structure?

> The standard pricing model [1] works. Stick to it. [1] - Use .99, .97, or .95 instead of whole numbers. Use odd numbers. Example: 127.99 or 129.99 for your lowest plan.

When I see "x.99" prices I always think "annoying gimmick" and typically associate it with low cost consumer goods.

Is there any evidence this type of pricing is appropriate for B2B products?

I was just thinking that consumers of B2B products aren't as easily influenced with pricing gimmicks.

> When I see "x.99" prices I always think "annoying gimmick" and typically associate it with low cost consumer goods.

It doesn't have to be .99 cents, but there is a reason people do this: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100119111051.ht...

I disagree completely. The prices act as a (slight) marketing tool giving a nod to their primary customer base, and adding .99 prices would feel like pandering. It's clean and simple, as a potential customer I appreciate that.

I really commend Keen for throwing consulting into the mix - Consulting prices are typically a black box to the customer that sales teams use as bargaining chips. This sort of openness is quite welcome as far as I'm concerned.

Thank you. That's how we feel about the pricing, but's it's definitely good to know that some folks are turned off by it.

This is pretty much what we're trying to do. We think the .99 pricing schemes dehumanize the relationship, and we're really all about humanity in our business relationships. Glad you appreciate it -- I'm surprised by the controversy, though, and we may have to reconsider after getting so much negative feedback on it.

Glad you like our published consulting stuff too! Openness is our core value, and it's good to hear that that is getting across to someone in the wild :)

> The way you priced things is cute, but shows that these are numbers that you made up.

It really does. The events and calls are nice round numbers, so it's not like the worked though to match the silly price points.

A bigger problem I thought though was the type of work.. it's an analytics company that couldn't factor their costs + target margin and arrive at a reasonable, marketable price, without resorting to gimmicks.. doesn't fill me with confidence.

Interesting. I'm curious:

Do you find our prices themselves to be unreasonable or unmarketable, upon quantitative analysis? Or is it just because we put them in powers of 2?

Depends on their target market. B2B tends to be less influenced by pricing gimmiks and more on straight-up cost/benefit analysis. In which case, the numbers can be completely arbitrary so long as the analysis comes out in their favor.

I don't agree with the cents thing. I think stick to whole numbers for this but odd whole numbers. Like 129 vs 130

How do you feel about GitHub's pricing?

All of my data points that they are leaving money on the table.

It's hard to measure emotion and brand loyalty, especially since you can't A/B test something as long term as the latter.

I'm a data scientist, but I'm the first to admit that data isn't always the answer. I'll take sound data-informed intuition over mechanical data-driven decision-making.

For me personally, "128, 256, 768, 2048" pattern looks like a product of nerdiness to the prejudice of real value. And, since real value is likely to be less that nerdic numbers, I instantly feel cheated by looking onto these rates.

Your pricing worries me. It looks like you have just made the numbers up and don't know what your costs are.

I feel the starting price is fairly high but that's not to say it won't work for you.

I've seen a lot of comments to this effect, and I don't get it. Just to pick an example more or less at random, Mixpanel's prices [1] are all multiples of $50; how is that any less arbitrary than using multiples of $128?

[1] https://mixpanel.com/pricing/

For me, I don't mind their pricing because it doesn't look gimmicky. I like the idea of using the 128,256,etc as the pricing model but I don't agree with it in practice.

Love the 128, 256, 768, 2048 prices :)

Your rate looks arbitrary enough that it flipped my "this must be algorithmic!" flag. But, its probably not.

Even if its not, it would be cool to hang a shingle as a consultant and have a variable rate based on how much work is in the pipeline. This would be an awesome visual and may actually help choose the optimum hourly rate over the long term.

Edit: hah, just saw the pattern. Still, interesting idea you piqued there. Surely it must have been done somewhere.

We'd love your feedback on consulting as a piece of our business model.

The main reason we're doing it is to put our customers at ease while we continue learning, not because we want it to remain a substantive part of our revenue at scale (because the linear opex is unattractive to us as businesspeople)

On your plans:

"What happens if I go over my plan?

If you go over your plan by 20%, we simply charge you for the next tier for that month only. We'll then revert you back to your the plan you last selected."

Very nice but the general idea would be to not do this so that people would tend to buy more than they need and then you make more money. From what you are doing you give don't give anyone a reason to purchase more than they have to by bumping to a higher plan. Not sure how much this matters given the tiers but I thought I'd throw it out there just the same because it would matter in other cases potentially. (Think back in the day of cell phone plans with minutes and how you were forced to buy extra minutes lest you get hit with a bigger charge.)

What is to prevent a user from just selecting the lowest plan, and letting you automatically price them into the cheapest plan each month based on actual use?

Shhh piptastic don't give away the obvious thing customers should do with these generous payment options.

Basing an API off a new company is scary. Especially for the Enterprise & Custom levels. Do you offer some sort of source code guarantee?

Totally understand that.

Q: What do you mean by source code guarantee?

Often times, particularly in enterprise software, part of the terms of a deal include a "source code escrow" clause. This means that if you go out of business, the customer with this term gets your platform's source code released to them so their investment into your technology doesn't implode completely.

Gotcha. Thanks pfab!

@kevinpfab is right, but it can include other clauses besides just if you go out of business. For instance, a sale of your company could be an escrow worthy problem because the new company may stop development, increase prices, offer a lower SLA, etc

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