XaaS Pricing Analysis and Resources From The Week
We’ve been getting a lot of questions from startups on key pricing strategy topics while doing our pricing page grading, and these have spurred several recent blog posts. Recent content we’ve published includes:
A new take on how to simplify value metrics in SaaS pricing
The benefits and drawbacks of lifetime deals in XaaS
A thing we usually hate, and want to make better - the SaaS competitive comparison page
Recent trends in SaaS pricing changes
Stay tuned on this last one; we’re crunching the data for our May 2022 pulse report, and we’ll be deep diving on the pricing changes we’re seeing across our XaaS Pricing companies.
This Week In XaaS Pricing
This is technically a last week item, since this is last week’s newsletter, but something that caught my eye was the internet feud that broke out between Stripe and Plaid (both XaaS Pricing covered companies).
This story had a lot of juicy stuff; the usual noise about Stripe and the Silicon Valley mafia, but also stuff closer to my world - competitive intelligence espionage and the positioning a new “competitor killer” offer by Stripe.
The drama started with Stripe’s announcement of Stripe Financial Connections, a new payments product enabling Stripe connections to financial institutions. Plaid, which plays in this space, contended that Stripe used interviews and RFPs to unethically gather intelligence to inform this product launch.
Where it got really interesting for me (of course) is when pricing was brought into the conversation via a thread on Hacker News. Stripe was cited by a Plaid employee as being 30% to 200% higher than Plaid, in response to a user comment about Plaid’s lack of pricing transparency. It’s hard to compare pricing; Stripe launched with transparent pricing, and has indicated that its pricing was vetted as market-aligned via testing, while Plaid publishes almost no public pricing.
I’ll reserve comment on who is right or wrong here. But there are two things that are worth taking away:
(1) lack of pricing transparency results in the market projecting a price position on you, which is rarely a winning strategy
(2) it’s interesting how this competitive battle quickly became about price positioning, and not about product capability, messaging, etc. Don’t underestimate how important price perception is to overall positioning perception.
XaaS Pricing Startup Musings
We’re a business day late with the newsletter this week, because last week was filled with good stuff that mostly existed outside of our walls and beyond the confines of our laptops.
On Thursday, TBR spent the morning with the Blue Ocean Society for a day of service cleaning up trash along our New Hampshire shoreline.
On Tuesday morning, we had a group of UNH graduate students onsite at our offices to present their final capstone project. Over the course of the semester, they worked with XaaS Pricing to help design and implement our data pipeline, including our core database architecture.
Friday afternoon, I was invited to the University of New Hampshire to watch the final presentations for the ISBA program’s Capstone project presentations. Two student teams helped us to build visualization tools for our XaaS Pricing data.
It was great to get outside (literally and figuratively) for a bit. Highly recommend finding ways to partner with your community if you are lucky enough to do so.
Back at it this week!
That’s all for this week. Would love your thoughts or comments, and enjoy the weekend. If you enjoy this newsletter, please subscribe, and if you’re so inclined, maybe share with a friend or two? I make that easy for you below :)