Ask HN: Is my SaaS a cost saver or a value provider?
Common theme about all of my customers is that.
They are already have the pdf and video files that they wish to target.
They have tried other methods such as manual or paying someone.
They have successfully been able to extract data using my SaaS.
Now I charge an "all you can extract", unlimited plan for my three plans (small, medium, large). The only difference is the number of workers as you go up the plan. The more workers, the faster your overall data extraction.
The price range starts from a few hundred dollars a month to a thousand dollars a month.
I am guessing that the main value from my SaaS comes from saving people lot of manual and time consuming labor. Am I a cost saver?
I am also seeing that the data that is extracted is of value to the customer, but they chose the data they wanted to extract from a resource they already knew ahead of time. Am I a value provider in this case?
If I am a cost saver, then ultimately, is lower monthly plan or higher monthly plan the answer? My competitors charge similar price but they are metered. These folks come to me because of my unlimited plan. The equivalent of hiring a human and paying wages is also unmetered but much more expensive (I assume around $1000 for an intern). Does it make sense to market the time saving features from this angle? "why hire 5 interns when you can pay ten times less than that with our SaaS" ?
If I am a value provider, marketing vectors from this angle appear difficult because it's hard to know what data they are looking to extract since it's specific to each customers and there is a wide variance on what they find valuable. Some guy wants scientific data because they are a school, some guy wants linguistic data because he's building a service etc.