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Comment by jcater | Hacker News Reader

"No apologies about the price increase. No salesy explanations. No BS. Just give it to people straight: We’re increasing pricing. Here is what it will be. Here is how it will affect you. Let us know if you have questions. Thanks."

Then:

"We just increased our prices for all plans... but not for you!"

I guess I was expecting more on how to (or even whether to) raise prices on existing customers. They simply grandfathered everyone in at existing plan prices.

Congrats on your success, but I'm not sure what we're supposed to get out of this article.

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Hey jcater - I hear you. This post is about how to execute the price increase AFTER you decided you a) want to increase prices & b) know what the new prices should look like

we grandfathered all existing SEATS! that's an important distinction. many of our old customers keep adding new paying seats (at the new pricing) and they only got to keep the old prices for all their existing seats + the ones they added during the 14 day promotion.

the 2 quick lessons learned that might be most relevant to you are: 1) make sure you reach out to customers + trial accounts and communicate personally with them on what's coming & 2) make sure to give them a reason to be happy & an incentive to add more paying seats (upsell opportunity)

Isn't a side affect of having a single customer that has X seats at one price and Y seats at another that you now have to keep track of multiple metrics per customer (# grandfathered users, # new users, price per grandfathered user, price per new user) instead of just user count and price per seat? And for the customer to understand how they're being charged they have to be told all these metrics as well in their invoice? What happens when you raise the price again in a year or two? You now have to track 3 different user counts per customers, all with different prices?

We've automated the invoicing and $ metrics part so there is not really that much to keep track of manually.

I get where you're coming from but the reality of B2B SaaS is that you'll almost always have factors that will make some differences in your $Rev per customer/seat.

Think about a) offering discounts to some customers b) different prices per seat tier c) old pricing plans etc etc

The goal needs to be to increase your CLTV over time and unfortunately this often means increasing prices, changing old pricing tiers/plans etc.

Out of curiosity, are you using a home-grown, in-house billing system to do this kind of stuff?

Yup. We built a bunch of billing/invoicing mechanics on top of Stripe.

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