
I analyzed 250 SaaS pricing pages - jackgavigan
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/12/18/i-analyzed-250-saas-pricing-pages-heres-what-i-found/
======
lvspiff
Working at a public university I can say the recent move towards "contact us"
pricing without including ANY pricing information has led to us not being able
to look at many products. The way it works in my state is unless the vendor is
already licensed with the university I'm not allowed to contact the vendor
except to get a quote. If you start to give me a sales pitch asking questions
about needs I am going to cut you off and hang up because its illegal for me
to work with the vendor prior to an agreement in place. If your product is
over 25K then I have to conduct an RFP which then means your company gets to
make a pitch on paper and good luck convincing your product that I want is
better than no name product I've never heard of from Oracle/IBM because they
can undercut you because procurement has no clue what features/setup costs
will be additional in their product that isn't in yours. They just go with
what is cheaper.

On the other hand you give me up front on your website 1 user pricing I can
take that public information and multiply it by the number we need, send it up
the chain, make a convincing argument for sole sourcing, and then you will
suddenly look like heroes with procurement because they were able to get it
"so much cheaper" because I just multiplied what it cost for 1 * 30,000 (e.x.:
number of students).

~~~
enraged_camel
Context: I work for a professional services firm. We sell, implement and
customize enterprise software for large organizations, including public
universities.

We NEVER provide pricing upfront. This is despite the fact that our software
vendors have their prices listed clearly on their pricesheets. We know the
price of a user license. But the first time our clients see the price is after
we've performed our due diligence, learned the ins and outs of their business,
and are sitting in front of their C-level people presenting the final proposal
along with the Scope of Work document that outlines implementation details.

The reason we don't provide prices upfront is because it commoditizes the
software and therefore our skills and services. It encourages clients to do an
extremely shallow feature-by-feature comparison of the competing products.
Doing that makes sense when purchasing commodities such as toothpaste or
laundry detergent. You can look at two products at the shelf, compare their
features, and go with the one that you think is better based on the messaging
on the package ("25% more whitening power!"). But enterprise software is not
like that. It is very complex and the price of the software is often only a
small part of the final price, which is frankly unknown at the start of the
engagement. That's why me giving you pricing information wouldn't help you one
bit (in fact it could make you look bad to your superiors when the final price
is several times higher than what you gave them originally).

Here's the thing: most of our clients LIKE the fact that we don't discuss
price upfront. They understand that software is a different beast, and its
value is dependent upon how well it fits into and/or can be molded into the
needs of the business. Only very inexperienced purchasers push us for price,
and over the years we've found ways of disarming or at least sidestepping
them.

The bottom line is that companies who provide price upfront end up competing
on price. And history has shown us that that's a race to the bottom.

~~~
rsync
"Here's the thing: most of our clients LIKE the fact that we don't discuss
price upfront. They understand that software is a different beast, and its
value is dependent upon how well it fits into and/or can be molded into the
needs of the business. Only very inexperienced purchasers push us for price,
and over the years we've found ways of disarming or at least sidestepping
them."

I am not sure which side of that interaction to hold in more contempt ...

~~~
dikdik
This carrot peeler has a variable value to customer, dependent on how much the
customer will use it. We won't put the price out there until we know how
valuable it is to our customer.

LOL.

~~~
enraged_camel
Nope.

A better analogy is a toolbox. That's our combined product and service
offerings. While each toolbox has ~50 different tools, most customers end up
needing only a subset. Furthermore, they need each tool to be customized to
their specific use case. So we use our technical skills and knowledge to
modify those tools, package them and offer them as a customized solution.

That's why it would be silly for us to say "each toolbox costs X dollars."
Each solution has a different price depending on what the customer wants to
get out of it.

~~~
paulddraper
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s?k=Tool+sets](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s?k=Tool+sets)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Perfect

------
peteretep

        > Enterprise customers just want to buy. Jason says
        > that price doesn’t matter for enterprises. More than
        > 80 percent of the time, they just want to get set up
        > with a solution as efficiently as possible. Price
        > comes after features.
    

That's ... misleading.

Software is often not just purchased by an enterprise all at once. More
frequently, some team with a small budget decides it would be useful to use
tool X. Someone with a company card is put upon to purchase a license for the
5 people in the team. Other teams get interested, and start using it. Costs
get to the point where it needs to be sent to procurement, at which point, it
becomes an enterprise software deal. But it didn't start that way - it started
with some small team who _are_ price sensitive trialing it...

~~~
ferentchak
This internal viral growth strategy is actually a disruptive methodology to
traditional sales methods. Most companies did not buy this way traditionally.
Startups and hackers often think this is how software is sold to the Fortune
500 but for the most part the CTO or someone in her office has already been
woo'd and large enterprise agreements are in place.

When a product like this begins to gain traction inside a large company it
usually sparks a response from an internal immune system of champions for the
entrenched software companies. These people are trained to explain why the new
product cannot "scale" to enterprise needs and spread FUD about the new
product.

From my experience if the new product can keep it's prices very low the price
pressure can usually win out in the long run. Paying an army of salespeople to
take everyone out for steaks can be expensive and in the end that cost is put
back on the customer.

You can see the incumbents (IBM, CA etc) trying to figure out how to deal with
disruption caused by companies spreading with this more viral model. (Amazon
AWS, Atlassian etc).

Fun times out there it's interesting to see how the world is changing.

~~~
spinlock
It's funny that you mention Atlassian. We tried to get Jira for a team I was
working on a few years back and were told no by the IT department. They said
we should use an internal system that someone had hacked together in a
satellite office. Then they tried to charge us $100k for that.

Deals at big companies always have more moving parts than just plopping down a
credit card. There's some manager who wants to put people under him to manage
the system. Someone else who wants to boost their status by pumping up their
budget, etc...

------
nerdy
The title is somewhat misleading because only 48/250 had actual pricing pages,
the others had what really amounts to "contact us" pages for their sales
teams. Fortunately it's still an informative read, and even 48 pages are
enough for meaningful discussion of pricing pages. The original post has
additional infographics at the end of the article (a helpful way to reason
about ideas contained within after going through it all in text):
[https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-
pages/](https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-pages/)

As a consumer I often feel like contact-style "pricing" pages are a way of
trapping customers into a hard-sell. Granted some pricing structures are
complicated out of necessity, especially those where usage plays a significant
role in the cost to the provider (substantial bandwidth transfer,
hardware/setup, human resources). More often than not I immediately abandon
any such service if contacting for pricing is the only option. It was
surprising to see 80%+ (202/250) of companies didn't list their pricing
because my personal real-world experience feels like the inverse.

The article discusses the reasons for the contact-only approach, which boil
down to preventing biases for enterprise customers. While that's
understandable in some situations, not all SaaS is intended to target
enterprise customers. It goes on to consider pros/cons of the multifaceted
concept that is tiered pricing. If read this much of my comment but not the
article, go read it now!

(A couple typos for the author: "boost revenue"→"boosts revenue",
"Abscense"→"Absence")

~~~
agopaul
The article seems a bit simplistic in the way it draws conclusions. Still I
wonder why so many companies picked the most counterintuitive solution.

Edit: I've come to believe that enterprise customers are likely to have
different, more strict requirements compared to SMB customers. This is
probably why, for enterprise sales, it could make more sense to approach the
pricing part in a more traditional way.

------
jamiesonbecker
At Userify[1], we just made our primary product (user and SSH key management
for cloud servers) completely free. We're charging incrementals for feature
upgrades, faster sync (from 3 minutes down to 10s), etc.

On the other hand, this hasn't slowed down our enterprise sales cycle at all;
in fact, it seems to have sped it up, with five enterprise deals in the
pipeline right now.

However, this approach is risky and it's really hard to get the balance right;
companies that have raised rounds might have to answer to investors. Still,
sometimes it's worth prioritizing long-term growth over short-term revenue.

My view is that we should always have something free or very cheap for the
smaller technologist/hacker/startup. They tend to bring their favorite
solutions to other larger companies. Goodwill is one of the best growth
factors.

1\. [https://userify.com](https://userify.com)

~~~
zephod
Trying to scroll your website on a Mac trackpad causes it to jump around like
crazy. Did you install some too-clever-for-its-own-good Javascript? (Has
anyone else noticed this is an increasing - and annoying - trend?)

~~~
agopaul
As an MBP trackpad user, I can't think of a more annoying web trend. To the
point that I'm thinking of finding a way to disable this kind of behaviour and
make a Chrome extension to block this thing everywhere.

~~~
Klathmon
Web developers just shouldn't ever try to fight the useragent.

If you find yourself trying to "fix" a UI/UX in the browser itself, stop.

I don't care if you want 300ms faster clicks on mobile, or to force smooth
scrolling in chrome, or to hijack right click for your sharing stuff, or
whatever.

You are breaking stuff trying to do those things, and it's ruining my
experience on your site.

~~~
paulcole
If their A/B testing indicates a net gain, why should they care about a
specific user's experience?

~~~
marcosdumay
User agents change.

If it's a clear win, they'll implement the behavior soon, and you'll be left
with a broken site.

------
sandstrom
This is the original article: [https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-
pages/](https://www.process.st/2015/12/saas-pricing-pages/)

(perhaps the link could be updated?)

------
natvod
> What can this teach us about SaaS pricing pages?

> Even the most successful SaaS companies in the world don’t conform to the
> ‘best practices’ laid out by conversion specialists.

Not sure I agree with this conclusion. Obviously you should test to see what
works for your audience but imo, the whole point of comparing how each company
does X is to extract the most common patterns people can use as solid starting
points.

The article would have been a lot of more useful if it listed at the end the
most common elements SaaS pricing plans share like 63% offer a free trial.
It's a waste of time to try to design from scratch instead of referencing what
most of your peers are doing.

Also, just because some SaaS companies don't conform to the best practices, it
doesn't mean that their way necessarily converts better. Maybe they would
convert more if they did certain best practices.

------
agopaul
I'm curious to hear from a SaaS which moved from a public to a non-public
pricing (or vice-versa). Why did you do it? Did it work better?

~~~
gk1
I'm a customer acquisition consultant for B2B software co's, so I've been
involved in a fair amount of decisions around this. Without sharing specifics,
I can objectively say that requiring prospects to contact you to learn about
pricing will...

1\. ... Weed out non-serious prospects such as students, freelancers, small
businesses, etc.

2\. ... NOT deter serious prospects (enterprise users). They are used to this
process and even expect it.

~~~
Chris2048
Is serious/non-serious so binary? My biggest issue is I wouldn't want to
commit anything, or give too much information away just to get a ballpark
figure. I'd also assume that I'd be aiding price discrimination - There is no
problem having up-front ballpark pricing _and_ a 'contact us' link. Hell, just
having a _high_ ballpark figure will weed out students and small businesses.

~~~
gk1
> There is no problem having up-front ballpark pricing

There certainly is, and it's a bigger problem than potentially turning away
people who are uneasy about sharing contact info. Just to name one: A SaaS
company may be willing to undercut a competitor's price for a sufficiently big
prospect, but advertising a high price at the outset may turn that prospect
away before you have a chance to talk to them.

------
paxtonab
After going through the article I would have really liked to see what the
average prices for these companies are, even though only 48 out of the 250
SaaS companies published pricing pages.

On average there were 3.5 pricing options per company, with the highest priced
option leading towards a "Contact Us" 38% of the time. I feel like the
companies that published prices were not targeting enterprise level companies
(just a hunch), so seeing the range of their prices could be a very
interesting guide for pricing SaaS outside of enterprise sales.

For enterprise SaaS an analysis of the Lead Gen forms for the other 202
companies would be very interesting.

~~~
Cyberdog
> After going through the article I would have really liked to see what the
> average prices for these companies are

Seeing as how the services they provide will be so different, would it really
be a relevant number?

Even then, how would you calculate it? The average of each company's lowest
price plan, or the average of the average of each company's plans, or the
average per-user price, or…?

------
JonoBB
Pretty good article overall, but some of the data is conflicting:

> HubSpot’s fantastic article about decision fatigue included a study which
> showed customers who were presented with six options instead of 24 were 10
> times more likely to buy.

> Sliding scales allow customers to be ultra-specific with their needs and pay
> for only exactly what they’re going to use. Plus, according to Peep Laja,
> giving users something to play around with will keep them sticking around
> for longer and subconsciously soaking in the details and pricing of your
> product.

------
jff
I analyzed 250 SaaS pages, and all of them were using Bootstrap

~~~
phoogathrw
Wow, did you really? Or is this a sarcastic comment? If serious, that's pretty
amazing.

------
noahmbarr
Here's a plan B based on several experiences with enterprise SaaS:

Start with something that isn't awful. Get it up early. A/B test that crap out
of out.

Keep it simple -- Only have one unit of measure (UoM) or feature
differentiator at first. Having multiple points of differentiation or UoM
leads to confounded experimentation. Try to add more " per's " over time :)

You can take forever debating this stuff. Data is the only guide.

------
samteeeee
"Peyton is a poo" at the bottom of the process st homepage?

~~~
KevinBongart
Yep, cool footer!
[http://screenshots.kevinbongart.net/VHUpQ.png](http://screenshots.kevinbongart.net/VHUpQ.png)

~~~
mangeletti
Wait, what? Where is this? On the homepage and on the article page, I didn't
see this. Was the website "hacked"?

------
BillFranklin
My colleague, Ed, wrote a post about B2B SaaS pricing pages a little earlier
this year: [https://blog.chartmogul.com/2015/05/b2b-saas-
pricing/](https://blog.chartmogul.com/2015/05/b2b-saas-pricing/).

------
pc86
Alternate title: "I analyzed 48 SaaS pricing pages, and quoted someone off of
Quora."

------
frik
> Just 4% of companies offer pricing on a sliding scale

Interesting. As a consumer I would like a slider, but as a company one wants
to upsale the user a higher priced plan. Recently, I saw several new SaaS
companies that have a slider.

~~~
dkyc
Actually, slider-pricing is often a bad idea for B2B-SaaS tools. Simple
reason: Almost _every_ purchasing process in almost _every_ company (other
than software startups) is expecting a fixed, monthly rate. Put yourself in
the mind of your champion: Do you want to push a deal like any else through
management, procurement, etc (which is already hard enough), or do the same
process every month for a slightly different price point?

~~~
frik
You are right. I assume these SaaS vendors try to attract end-user (B2C) and
small companies (B2B).

------
pbreit
I'm not sure there's a takeaway from all this. My sense is that pricing is
still really poorly understood. The one key thing to understand about product
configuration and pricing is that it depends a huge amount on how flush the
customer is with money. Bootstrap/unfunded/mom-pop will pay zero or very
little. A company with some friends/family or angel/seed funding can spend a
little bit. A fully funded or larger company can spend a lot.

------
namuol
Best sales advice I've ever received: Ask yourself not _how_ to sell, but
_what_ is worth selling.

If you're struggling with the _how_ , you're probably not very happy with the
_what_.

------
tdaltonc
Anything to say about trends over time or what works (as apposed to what _is_
)?

------
limeyx
I simply wont buy anything where the only option is "Contact us"

