

Ask HN: Which is a better pricing model - Tiered vs. Pay-As-You-Go - sharan

I see a lot of consumer startups going for the tiered pricing models whereas B2B SAAS seems to prefer a pay-as-you-go model.<p>Does anyone have any thoughts on the benefits of either?
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raquo
Pay-as-you-go can quickly become complex unless you have a very simple, one-
dimensional utility service without any premium features. Otherwise your
pricing will look like that of AWS (i.e. may be cheaper, but less
predictable). Tiered pricing is simpler, lets you define a minimum monthly
cashflow from each paying customer, and most importantly lets you discriminate
e.g. enterprise customers by offering features only they would want at a much
higher price.

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HerraBRE
I would love to hear some discussions on this. For example, I wonder how much
it matters how tech-savvy users are? I'm currently looking at a mixed model at
<http://pagekite.net/>, pay-as-you-go for bandwidth usage OR tiered monthly
subscriptions for heavier users and businesses.

I had kind of assumed that the average joe would prefer pay-as-you-go and
companies would go for a subscription - your comment suggests I may have it
backwards... :-P

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JonLim
Product Manager of PostageApp (<http://www.postageapp.com>) here, we are B2B
SaaS and we used a tiered model.

We chose to go in this direction because it allowed for a few things: better
predictability in terms of cash flow and better predictability in the amount
of resources needed. Having those two is somewhat critical to our success,
hence why the tiered subscription model works best for us.

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kgermino
Consumers IME prefer the predictability that tiered plans offer. That is, many
people would rather pay $40 for 400 minutes when they usually use 300 - 375
than $.11/min even though on average the PAYGO plan would be cheaper.

