

Ask HN: My App's Pricing plans.  - hajrice

Hey HN, I'm launching an SaaS app soon(description is below) and would like your opinion on the way we should go in terms of pricing.<p>Quick description of app:
Questionify manages your site's FAQ page by letting your customers ask questions(no login required). Questions are placed into categories(which of course you can manage) and are displayed according to the view count. Customers can subscribe to questions(there's a "I had that question too!" button which encourages this).<p>Do you think we should do Freemium? How do you think pricing plans would be ok, based on number of users/questions?<p>Feedback would be greatly appreciated.
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arch_hunter
In my completely unprofesional opinion, and with absolutly no experiance in
this area, I would advise you to skip freemium. I am guessing that if you go
with freemium you are going to get a bunch of people using it who are just
adding an FAQ to their freepages 'website' and are unable to or never plan to
upgrade to a paid version. The money will probably be in going after big
buisnesses, colleges, NPOs, etc. who want to find out what their customer's
questions really are. (Or possibly you could have a freemium version that had
advertisements in it, and have the ads pay for everything.)

I also recall seeing several people complain about how it is often those who
are not paying for the service that cause the most customer service
difficulties.

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hajrice
haha yeah, dealing with customer that aren't really paying can be a pain. In
fact, I'm going after businesses, focusing on B2B, so I agree with skipping
freemium.

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thibaut_barrere
My next SAAS app will be paid-only, at least at the beginning.

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thibaut_barrere
On freemium: I'd really follow the advice of "It is a numbers game, so bust
out your Excel spreadsheet" (from [http://gigaom.com/2010/03/26/case-studies-
in-freemium-pandor...](http://gigaom.com/2010/03/26/case-studies-in-freemium-
pandora-dropbox-evernote-automattic-and-mailchimp/)).

I would really try to understand how much a freemium user cost in your case,
and how many (and which) premium users you would need to cover the free ones.

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patio11
I would suggest not basing your pricing on costs. Instead, base it on the
value your users will perceive from your service. On reason is that the per-
user costs are likely to be too small for you to measure. (Pricing based on
costs also auto-commoditizes your offering.)

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I second that actually, totally :)

I would just ensure that the freemium costs remain under control (that was the
meaning I wanted to convey, at least).

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ScottWhigham
The problem that I have with your question is that I'm having trouble what you
mean when you suggest you base pricing on "number of users/questions". What
does that mean? To me, as a webmaster, I start thinking, "Wait - do I have to
know how many users are hitting my website or do they mean how many users can
manage/edit the questions/answers?" It's a bit confusing.

I'm going to assume that you are thinking along the lines of "How many users
the company appoints to edit/manage the entries." Okay - if that's the case
then what happens if a big company (like MSFT) decides to try you out on 10
pages that have 1-2 editors? You might get tens of thousands of hits but still
get the same revenue that a one-person site with 1k uniques a month gets you.
Can you scale that?

I don't know - it's a tough slope but I think you have to put something in
there to prevent DOS to other clients because you are fulfilling one big
client's requests ten-fold over the others.

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hajrice
Sorry, I didn't really define my question well. Basically by users I mean
people that may edit the website. You have really good arguments. I don't
really find this being fit for big companies, but I suppose one way of pricing
would be by how much traffic your site gets which sort of directly imposes how
much money your business is making. In my opinion this is by far the best way
to go.

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niravs
There was an interesting article on HN recently:
[http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/03/07/choosing-a-price-for-
you...](http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/03/07/choosing-a-price-for-your-webapp-
or-startup-using-multivariate-testing/)

Might be of relevance to you.

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hajrice
Wow this looks really good. Thanks for the link.

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John212
Freemium may work if the free package has your logo/name and and a link back
to your site on the users FAQ page.

If you get any reasonable volume on your free product, this could work well
for your SEO & brand.

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imp
Do you have any high-end premium features? Or are users and questions the only
knobs you have turn?

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hajrice
Well, you can brand your page using logos, colors. Another feature is you can
upload screenshots along with pasting a youtube video link and we convert it
into a video object.

Besides that, I guess stuff like live search etc.

