Ask HN: pricing question
whats better for SaaS pricing - pay per user or per usage? eg. we have a link sharing tool for teams. should the pricing be based on #of links shared or #of users?
our competition: mostly they have all user based pricing
my view: i think value of the product will be more visible if no. of users in the network are increased & no. of links shared are also increased.
my concern: if we price per user & end up restricting free flow of users then do you think we may end up turning off many of the acquired teams?
Ideally whichever is easiest to calculate use for by the customer (assuming you can keep your pricing structure similar in terms of what you earn as well).
If users might be sharing anywhere from 5 to 500 or 5,000 links, that's a pricing nightmare in which the customer doesn't know their costs and it might be very hard to estimate ahead of time. That's a non-starter for most businesses.
When something has such low per unit costs and value as an individual link, I'd tend to argue in favor of a layer above that which simplifies the pricing: in this case, the per user pricing model. If you can provide unlimited links per user in that model, all the better.
Agreed that estimating the links will be difficult for customers. looks like identifying the optimum team size (for viral adoption) for a freemium model is quite challenging.