I don't care if companies try to insult me with their pricing (I'll gladly buy the "hobbyist tier" if that's what I need), but please, just publish pricing.
I hate when pricing sheets say "Call us for pricing" - just tell me outright, are you charging $5 a seat or $500 a seat? I'm not going to call or email to find out, I always assume that "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
Not it wouldn't, much as engineers might think it so. Sales is not purely technical, it is an emotional process. If the seller can convince the buyer to buy, they generate a lot more income than having people go through sticker shock. One of the first things they teach you in sales is to focus on the benefits of how the product will make the user's life better, and use that to anchor the price.
Also, the "contact us" pricing pages are not for regular people, they are for VPs or executives to go through. That it filters out regular people is a feature, not a bug.
It's human nature to make emotional decisions, not necessarily logical ones. I'm not sure how one would rethink the system rather than using it to our advantage.
The OP is a being a little sensitive. Though are lots of little tricks like this to get people to go up a level. They learnt it from restaurant menus and wine lists.
My pet hate currently is opaque “credits” and value based billing.
I saw an ETL tool earlier which charges on a per column basis. I’m sure that backfired over flat tiered plans.
Another ETL charges per unique primary key synced, ignoring the fact the systems with append-only databases could move the exact same _volume_ of objects as another system, but cost 100 or 1000x more because of an arbitrary uniqueness constraint.
Not to mention they also use a credit system which not only uses different tiers of pricing per credit, but ALSO credits have a sliding scale of value where syncing less rows has a higher marginal cost than syncing more..
You need a constraint solver to figure out pricing, it's madness.
I don't really understand the appeal of ETL as a service. I can't see what value they can provide over implementing it yourself. And I can see that it would become a royal pain if you want to do something they don't support.
OP preempts this (whether you agree is another matter):
> One might argue I am being overly sensitive – I beg to differ. I suspect this company’s intentions were not pure.
> The product does not make sense for a hobbyist to use (it’s a tool for businesses). More likely, they’re hoping I will tell myself, “I’m not a hobbyist, I’m a real business!” and proceed to select a more expensive plan than I actually need.
What do you think of the de facto pricing of SaaS companies where they list 50$ per month (PAID YEARLY).
Almost every SaaS pricing is doing this.
At obe point few customers would write us and claim that our competitors were cheaper even though they were not.
The yearly plan of the competitor was slightly cheaper than our monthly plan. That forced us also to play that game where we added yearly plans with the pay 50$ per month (PAID YEARLY) just to not look more expensive on a superificial comparison of our customers
I had my service's pricing page say "$5 per year" and lots of people complained that $5 per month is too expensive. So I switched to "$1 per month (paid yearly)" and now get far fewer complaints for more than double the price. I consider it a tax on something.
They also like to put dark UX patterns around this. More than once I’ve had to request a refund after seeing a monthly price and then being billed for the annual price.
It's likely based around driving a sunken cost fallacy where the price is good enough to justify buying outright but the value is just good enough to force you to use it.
It's a fair point, albeit not something I'd really thought of. The main one that annoys me is the bigger, highlighted, more prominent 'most popular' option... which.. usually seems really unlikely to be true? Especially when there's a free option, it just almost certainly isn't. Obviously the free option is never the prominent most popular option.
Meta point: 'don't insult me with your' tiny blog-in-a-sidebar & massive photo-content?
Because it's where my eyes naturally/most restfully fall? I don't sit to, or facing, the left of my monitor.
Fair enough, author and you and others obviously like it - but follow that line of thought and why do we have sidebars? Why aren't they middle bars? Put the actual content to the side.
A lot of research has shown that in general humans (at least in English speaking countries) look at top left side of page and scan left to right, top to bottom.
People do not look first in the middle of the page .
While it does sound like a joke I agree to some degree. 3.99 is supposed to make me feel like its 3 bucks instead of 4 and my monkey brain probably can't override the initial emotional response. Knowing this I feel kind of insulted that they think I'm stupid enough to fall for it.
idea: browser extension that automatically rounds up any number ending in ".99" and includes a visual indicator/toggle that lets you flip back to the original.
The .99 pricing feels like an American phenomenon to me. Not that it's never used in other places, but it seems far more prevalent in the United States. For me it immediately makes the business seem a little bit slimy.
I rarely see it in Europe, and I think I've never seen it in Scandinavia.
> The .99 pricing feels like an American phenomenon to me. Not that it's never used in other places, but it seems far more prevalent in the United States. For me it immediately makes the business seem a little bit slimy.
> I rarely see it in Europe, and I think I've never seen it in Scandinavia.
I have no idea what part of Scandinavia you're talking about, but in Sweden this type of pricing is used all the time.
Right now I just opened a random page of prepared food for one of the big-3 supermarkets and I can see Tortellini for 35,90kr; Gnocchi for 28,90kr; Tikka chicken for 56,90kr.
If I go to another random page for kitchen appliances (Elon) I can see a whole range of items for 2995kr (fridge) 5995kr (dishwasher) and so on - infinitely.
These are exactly equivalent to the .99 price manipulation psychology.
So tired of the self-righteous "in Scandinavia we don't do this" crowd.
I wonder if Scandinavia could be due to 1/100 of a crown being even more ridiculously small than a penny. Wikipedia tells me that only Denmark still has sub-krone coins, and that's 50 ore.
When I was in the (US) military, none of the vendors like the base exchange or on-base bars or restaurants overseas used coins smaller than a nickel (5 cents). It just wasn't worth shipping pennies overseas. The one exception was the post office. This was ~2005, so people still used cash.
Sounds like the SaaS was able to help you decide their service isn't a good fit for you.
If your usage and budget is on a hobbyist level but you're expecting business level support, you won't be happy with the service and they helpfully ruled their service out of your choices.
I'm sure if you keep looking you'll be able to find something that will give you the warm fuzzies at your desired price.
> Opt for metered billing over tiered pricing when possible
Hmm that does sound like the hobbyist tier. Depending on the tool, I'd go for predictable costs if it's a business expense unless it's part of the money maker plumbing and really needs to scale to unexpected demand...
Metered pricing makes it hard to get approval to buy at many organizations. Simple metering (per user) is doable because the purchase department can pretty easily count heads. Complex metering, where you need someone with a deep understanding of the use the product, someone good at spreadsheet modeling, and somebody in purchasing all to sit down and agree together to buy your product? Ouch. You better be a FAANG-sized cloud provider or something like that, it’s going to be a grind.
Pretty much all retail does this, and the general population generally like it. JCPenney tried going to "everyday low prices" once and it failed miserably. Now, they employ a system of discounts, discounts on discounts, rewards, credits, etc that essentially means you have no idea how much anything in their store will cost you. But, their customer's tend to like it that way.
On the one hand, you have a million "growth hackers" espousing the benefits of optimizing this and that, including pricing, to extract the most value from your customers. On the other hand, some people are going to call you manipulative if you do it. As a customer, I filter through the bs and go with what I need. I also know an organization is likely to have some offputting "player" working, say, marketing, but the tactics employed at that level won't speak for their whole org and/or products. Maybe I'm influenced one way or another, but if I keep paying, you must be offering me enough value or I'll eventually walk away.
Yes, it would be great if pricing and marketing was always honest but I don't expect to see "We do our best, but we're often mediocre, so just go for the cheapest plan" anywhere soon.
Train the bs filter. It'll serve you well in this and many other cases.
If you're selling your software with a subscription price, I will immediately click off your site. I'm not exaggerating that the moment you start trying to edge in on rent collection for marginal utility, my eyes glaze over and I stop caring about your product. You could be selling a magic wand that fixes my life and fulfills my every desire, but I'd have no idea because there's a $2/month subscription cost attached.
The reason why is principle. Build a good product, price it appropriately and people will come. I payed an exorbitant amount for a Bitwig license, but that was because they provided a product that made me happy and was a fair deal. No dark UX practices, no contract or perpetual payment obligation, just a transaction of money and software. I regret it less than my Netflix subscription, honestly.
- some software requires constant maintenance. Subscriptions are the only way to make it possible.
- some software may cost damn lot to create so no feasible single payment exist to even cover the costs of creation (especially on the early stages of sw lifecycle [and/or] when marketing is poor, but the devs still need funds to proceed). Subscriptions are the only way to make the price bearable for the general public. Example: market of games for Android. Google has tought the public that many sw for Android is very cheap or even free - try to stay afloat on that premise without subscriptions.
- etc etc etc
I'm sorry that I have to tell you what to do (and nobody likes to hear such unasked advices) but you really should try to build your own product and make it successful. This is the only way to validate the viability of your "principle".
You basically stated one argument split into two bullet points, and then listed 'etc etc etc'. It's not even an argument I disagree with as someone who writes software for money, most of our infrastructure requires constant maintenance. However, you know as well as I do that nobody is really 'disrupting' anything in the business space anymore. I've seen entire companies built around the idea that someone has a hard-to-get CSV file with vehicle/networking/government/personal info, and they provision it to you piecemeal. That's an insult to my intelligence, and they know what they're doing. Same thing goes for any other company that's exclusively providing a fancy frontend to some worthless database, it's just a different permutation of the same scam.
> you really should try to build your own product and make it successful
I have no desire to make a product. I'm a programmer and a server technician, not a product manager. The tools of my trade are free and openly developed, no amount of CI Pipeline startups will change that.
> You basically stated one argument split into two bullet points, and then listed 'etc etc etc'.
Well, no, actually. It's really a two separate not connected cases. I've already provided an example for the second bullet and here's an example for the first one: sw/service that integrates with a number of third party external network interfaces. The cost comes from ever-changing external endpoints.
> I've seen entire companies built around the idea that someone has a hard-to-get CSV file...
Sure, almost anyone encountered such companies. That's just another side of a coin. Not a reason for me to dismiss subscription model for some sw as a "principle".
On what I certainly do agree with you is a notion that companies should state very clearly why I should pay them a subscription instead of a single payment. "We just want more money" is indeed close to a kind of an insult.
> I have no desire to make a product.
That's an issue ;) So you don't give yourself an opportunity to review your decision and your principle just comes unchallenged.
> That's an issue ;) So you don't give yourself an opportunity to review your decision and your principle just comes unchallenged.
I didn't say that I don't think about it. I actually give it a lot of thought, which is probably why I despise the idea so much. I'd rather die an asshole who was a decent programmer than Yet Another Startup Baron who lost their life savings to a nothingburger served in gold foil.
> Build a good product, price it appropriately and people will come.
Unfortunately, much as I would like that to be the case, that's just not true. People won't come simply because you build it, in fact that's a common refrain heard in the startup world. People, however, will pay for subscriptions if they materially help them. And subscriptions are often the best for developers because software development is not static, there are always bugs to fix and features to add.
This blog post is garbage.
If the red line between you using a tool or not depends on the harmless word to describe a pricing tier, this is not a professionally made decision.
You are, at best, making a hobbyist tier choice.
I'm pretty sure he is talking about aiven.io, I had exactly the same though when checking their pricing. It's looking like a dark pattern to force you to choose a bigger plan
Another example of manipulation in pricing is the unit of measure of DSL speed.
All ISP providers across all countries advertise their speed in Mbps which is Mega bit per second.
Now remember that 1 Byte = 8 bits.
No-one ever uses bits as unit of measure in anything yet ISP use it just to make their speed look 8x bigger than they are.
Frankly this is a form of false advertisement that spreaded quick forcing everyone to adopt it.
I used to agree with you back in the 90s, when the only people who paid for an internet connection were somewhat technically aware enough to know what speed they wanted, but not enough to know the difference between bits and bytes.
Today? I would argue 95% of people don't know or care how many kilobyte per second their Spotify uses, or how many gigabytes per minute watching Twitch at 1080p uses.
bit per second is a pretty standard way to measure network traffic. Just be glad they aren't listing baud!
The networking community historically follows a tradition coming from telecoms, which is why there is a bit of a cultural split between networking folks and other computing folks (software and hardware folks have more cultural connection to each other than to networking!)
Apenwarr actually traces this cultural and historical split forward [1] even to the difference between lower levels of the stack defined by IEEE standards (e.g. 802.11) and higher levels of the stack defined by IETF (e.g. IP).
The telecommunications companies themselves screw up the numbers all the time. When you talk to their customer service, tech support, sales, etc, they will say 'megabyte' or 'gigabyte'.
Thank you for this insight! That WOULD make sense!
Unfortunately given the shadiness of pricing in telecoms I believe the pricing and unit of measure are not technical-based and the bits part is not because they are actually super technical about it.
Bits per second is really the only honest way to sell linespeed.
Right from the start telegraphy used symbols per second because anything else gets difficult to explain (eg hello is 5 symbols, Hello is 7 symbols). 200 years later we've made this more complex, not less. If I send a byte, it ends up as approx 64 bytes on the wire. Which bytes do we count? Do we count inter-frame spacing?
Symbols per second for transit and packets per second for routing are the only metrics that are actually fair
I hate when pricing sheets say "Call us for pricing" - just tell me outright, are you charging $5 a seat or $500 a seat? I'm not going to call or email to find out, I always assume that "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".