

How to successfully increase your SaaS prices - SteliE
http://blog.close.io/post/69090856720/how-to-successfully-increase-your-saas-prices

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jcater
"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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SteliE
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)

~~~
dougmccune
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?

~~~
SteliE
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.

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

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

