pccampbell

Looks less like it though, as there's definitely a postmortem being given about the ebb and flow of freemium/revenue models: http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2014/05/28/five-lessons-for-co...

This begs the question: figure it out later once you have a lot of users or figure it out with a small number of users and then try to get a lot of users?

Obviously not that simple, but curious.

All for respecting the dead, but I'm more curious in terms of how you can have 5 million users and still need to shut down. Any commentary on whether it's a monetization issue or more along the lines of "5 million isn't worth the VC"?

Definitely interesting to see the quantitative approach. Anyone else utilizing something closer to this versus A/B testing?

Buying the product.

Hey Marktangotango,

Patrick from Price Intelligently here. We think about this stuff all...the...time.

Overall, it's fairly dependent on the product you're selling, but considering what you mentioned check out these links:

1. The Saddest SaaS Pricing Pages of the year: Goes through a lot of general information on setting up your SaaS pricing, particularly on throttling your value metric appropriately: http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/192297/The-Sadde...

2. A Study of the Top 270 SaaS Pricing Pages: Go into a breakdown of pricing pages as well as a bit of a how to: http://go.priceintelligently.com/saas-pricing-blueprint

3. Developing Your Pricing Strategy: Ebook on developing your pricing strategy in general: http://www.priceintelligently.com/

To answer your questions though, it's a tradeoff on simplicity versus spurring upgrades. Companies like Wistia.com have a lot of success with giving it all away and charging strictly on the throttle, whereas companies like Uservoice.com need to utilize differentiation because of their value metric.

Feel free to send an email if you want to talk live about this: patrick[at]priceintelligently[dot]com

Nice! We're big fans. :)

Tell Brendan to stop grinding his coffee so loudly.

- Patrick

Hmmm. It really depends on the product/customer. The big thing here is that you don't have to have a perfect pricing strategy out of the gate (or ever); it's iterative.

Look at the Hootsuite example for instance - at this point with 8 million users they should really have more than one plan because there are several different personas in the mix.

Buffer on the other hand had a mono-price schema for a long time, because they wanted the simplicity while they were getting traction (to your point). Now that they're solid, they've been iterating the product and the pricing into their business plan.

Big points:

- Each customer persona = a pricing tier - Price based on the customer willingness to pay = talk to them about pricing - Iterate - your pricing should change as your product and customer do

No worries. Love the product!

Yea. Keep in mind that patio11 is playing in more of the enterprise software space with consulting. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ has pricing loud and proud.

A LOT of SaaS companies think they're the former when in reality they're the latter.

Sounds like a great customer experience (sarcasm intended).

Coyness has it's place I suppose, especially when you're first starting out with your pricing or need to optimize for touch over scale. Hopefully they figured that out ASAP.

Noooooooooooooo. :)

Agreed. It's a bit of a tradeoff. Definitely companies that need to hold prices in, but I'd venture that a lot of mid market companies that are opaque about their pricing should actually be more transparent.

Good rule of thumb - more custom product or custom customer, then more customer/opaque pricing.

You can still do much better than a "contact us for pricing" page though.

"Okay, no problem. Welcome to our pen company! My name is Patrick- and you are? Circa? Great, nice to meet you."

Is this the first time you have been to our pen company Circa?"

:)

Agreed that some products (a lot in enterprise software or consulting) require a more buttoned up pricing strategy, but if you serve the mid-market at all you should at least provide them some sort of signpost. "Here's what a project sort of looks and here's where the price starts"

With good design you can make it happen. You'll actually help the sales process 10x, because you'll get rid of the tire kickers and people who are just sort of interested.

Haha. Good way to put it. Feel the same way. We talked more about it here: "Why Your Secret Pricing Strategy is Overrated" - http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180265/Why-Your-...

Ha. Touche.

Fixed the spelling error and added something a bit better in.

Thanks!

Sounds good. Check out that ebook if you want a good survey of the land of pricing pages. Feel free to reach out too if you want a sounding board.

Thanks, homie.

LOVE you guys with all caps intended. I'd look to Wistia as a really good example for you guys. Your value metrics follow a similar slide up and you can use that extra space for what you do best - awesome content/product marketing.

Wow. This just happened, as I took the screenshot very early this morning. Not a big fan of the change in terms of clarity, but there's improvement in the product marketing around why their solution is better than Maildril, Amazon, etc.

Biggest thing I'm curious about from a data perspective concerns the science behind the thresholds they've set. You want to see where the break in usage or value is and make sure you capture 95% of that group. Power users of that plan are then pushed into the next plan accordingly.

Ha! Well, I didn't want to be completely blatant. A lot of our content tells you how to solve the problem, but yes - we do have software and tech services to help you. Work with folks like New Relic, Insightly, Wistia, etc.

Good point. We touched on it a bit at least in concept, but we'll do better in the future about being more inclusive of the solution (just a lot of content for one post). Maybe pick one or two and breakdown and then build up a solution?

The ebook linked from the page has a lot on the right stuff to do.

Wow. COMPLETELY agree. Transparency is key in optimizing your sales funnel.

Check this post out where we talk about it a bit, as well: http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180265/Why-Your-...

This seems super reckless.

This is the way it's supposed to work. This doesn't appear how it's working with RapGenius:

TC article: http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/

"Update: Rap Genius’ founders have provided this statement, indicating they’re working with Google on being returned to better search result rankings:

... (statement from RapGenius talking about resolution)

"Looks like Rap Genius and Google might come to some compromise where Google restores at least some of the startup’s search result ranking juice in exchange for it cleaning up its act. However, at least some of the decreased visibility is likely to stick around for a long time, impeding Rap Genius’ business. We’ll have more details on the outcome of the talks as soon as possible and we are awaiting a response from Google."

Agreed, especially in the different SEO conversations that flair up (Calacanis at Mahalo, Google's problems, etc.). Just the way the RapGenius gents have said their talking with Google about a "resolution" is unsettling without a more formal process laid out.

Article on getting ahold of Google: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006900.html

Funny how most of the ways to get a response involve causing a scene to get attention for an answer.

It was essentially the same tactic as comment lurkers, IMHO.

He's unfortunately the SEO poster child though, which is hard. Do you think there should be any line of communication between Google and a site for SEO?

I'm torn on whether or not there should be a more formal process or they should just keep it completely locked up.

Do you think DuckDuckGo can play the long game though? #GoogleWinsEverything

My bigger issue is with the fact that they're able to "negotiate" with Matt Cutts and team while thousands of other sites don't have that bargaining power. Started a discussion on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964169