Our pricing model was broken. Here's how we fixed it
blog.heapanalytics.com
blog.heapanalytics.com
But they actually ended up in roughly the right place: free for unfunded services, a healthy monthly for lightly funded and a large monthly for well-funded.
They also get right that all substantive features should be offered in the free/lower-priced tiers. The trick is to put "enterprise-y" features in the more expensive tiers. Best example is multi-user logins. This is not a core feature of the product but is a good proxy for a customer who has ability and desire to pay more.
Setting your prices based on cost is like designing a product with features instead of benefits. Does HP design printers that can fold paper airplanes? No, they design printers that print business documents faster, crisper, and more reliably, because that is of value to businesses with money. In the same way, do they price ink cartridges based on the cost of the pigments? No, they charge by value, and it is worth a lot of value to the average business to get their documents and spreadsheets printed!
And don't try to justify cost-based pricing by saying customers can just implement and host their own solution using open source code. Sure... and they can make their own printer ink and load it into recycled cartridges... but effectively zero percent of people will ever do that. :)
I do agree though that for a technology startup, cost+ pricing should not even be on your list of options.
I think per unique visitor is relatively easier than per visit because an additional visit does not even tie to additional value.
The fact that you capture a lot of data from so many people (which costs you) does not mean that it brings value to me.
It is also important to remember that you are not prison in isolation but in comparison to your competitors. In your case, it is KISSmetrics and Mixpanel.
It is not something you can get perfect at one go. It has to keep evolving. You have a great product.
We tried to match a user's value as closely as possible by pricing per visit (instead of per user). This assumes, of course, that the frequency of a user's visits correlates closely with their overall value, which is certainly imperfect in some cases.
Is there a mobile friendly interface?
One of Heap's most important value props is retroactive analysis. You forgot to define an event upfront? No problem - it's available for you to analyze across your app's entire history.
A 60-day free trial helps our users make better use of retroactive analysis than, say, a 30-day free trial. The longer you accumulate data via Heap, the more viscerally you understand this need.
Keep an eye out for Simonides if you're interested.
They've created an interesting model here though.. Its basically free or one price, unless you're really big. If you're really big, they ask you to talk with a sales person, but clearly state a starting price (which I've seen few sites with a "contact us" do) to get the ball rolling.
Do you suggest sampling for those kind of sites?
Agreed that this is still not ideal for medium-sized content sites, though a lot better than the old pricing model, which charged by the user (as opposed to the visit) and thus was a total nonstarter for them. We usually don't suggest sampling, because we do think there's value in using Heap for analysis at the top of the funnel.