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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

yeah $50 is still not a lot for the service you provide, if shneider electric, weework, ... are really your customer, you could probably 10x your price. You have to think on the value your bring to them instead of the the complexity of your service.

Actually for your product I would expect the price to be around $200 per month for a <300 people company

But the price has a big impact on what people expect from you, so if this is a side project, you may prefer keep it low

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For a large number of engineers in the target market of this service, a commitment of $50/mo subscription service (which translates to $600/yr) can be put on the credit card without too many hoops, but a commitment of 10x that (translating to $6000/yr) may require actual approvals and a business case. The first price raise might have been successful because it was still in the realm of "put it on the card", but 10x the current price quickly pushes that into a different territory

I agree that it's a low price, but disagree one should just raise it because they can. Keeping prices low helps prevent competitors from undercutting, or even competing in the first place, in my opinion. If this service were charging say, 500 per month, they'd likely have a lot of knockoffs enter the space.

If I'm a huge business getting a lot of value out of a $500/mo SaaS product that does everything I need and is reliable, it would be a pretty bad decision to take a chance on a new $200/mo service offering the same thing.

That's true for a while, but companies churn a lot as new things come about. I can't even tell you how many travel/HR, ticketing, chat, and video conferencing systems my rather boring company has gone through in my tenure.

More importantly, new customer acquisition. At 500 a pop, someone like me could be inclined to give it a go, and I'm just one not-so-motivated guy. That's great passive income with a handful of customers. For 50? Not worth the effort since now I'd need a handful x 10. At 500 a pop, companies with way more resources will outpace and outspend you for that. Less likely for 50. Just my opinion.

* To be clear, the above is a hypothetical. I have zero interest in copying anyone's work, or really any side project at the moment.

Right but a new prospect is going to want to evaluate $200/mo offering and see if that meets their needs. So you are loosing out on new business.

OP here. It we because we were getting customers like Schneider Electric and WeWork that made me more confident to raise the prices.

> Actually for your product I would expect the price to be around $200 per month

I love hearing this. Thanks!

> so if this is a side project

Definitely not a side project!

Usually the good price is the price you are comfortable with. But most of the time, this is a cheaper price than customer are willing to pay.

In any case you have the good behavior, put a price, give it a few months, if after a few months you feel like you want to increase it, do it, if you want to decrease it, do it and contact people who pay more.

And don't forget that if you want to target bigger customers, you can, but you will have to make them pay much more than currently, but you will also have to change a lot of things in the way you operate your company (you can have more info on my blog, link in my bio)

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