
Ask HN: How should I price a plain text watermarking SAAS? - titusblair
I am working on a plain text watermarking SAAS and would really like your ideas on what I should charge for it. You can watermark facebook posts, twitter posts, word documents, website content, etc. Should I charge via API calls or per content watermarked, etc? Should I have multiple plans or just a few?  Should I not charge at all? I really want this to be something lots of people can use and so pricing it well at the start is very important, at least I think so! I want this to be available for everyone but also want to turn it into a profitable business if possible. Any thoughts, experience, feedback would be much appreciated! Thanks!
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pedalpete
I don't understand why you would want to watermark text? How many people want
to do that? Why do they want to? Text is copywritable (with the exception of
text on social networks, which you don't have the rights to - so why
watermark??)

You "really want this to be something lots of people can use". That's a good
start, but you believe pricing will have a big influence on adoption.

The way many companies deal with this (as long as there aren't prohibitive
costs involved) is to give the product away for free for a bit. Have a beta,
find how many people want it, how often do they use it, what do they use it
for. Don't worry about it being to many, it will likely be 100% less than you
think (yup, I mean 0) until you start personally talking to people and getting
them to try it.

Once you know how and why people are using it, you _might_ be able to estimate
how much it is worth to them, but probably not. You'll have to look at how
large the market it, how many customers you can get, how much your costs are,
and does the whole thing make financial sense for anybody?

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brudgers
Because I'm not clear on what "watermark" means in this context or what
problem watermarking solves, I have no idea what a good price might be. More
information such as examples or a prototype implementation might help.

Good luck.

