This Week in XaaS Pricing: 4/13/22
Things that don't scale, and some interesting pricing changes in the wild
XaaS Pricing Analysis and Resources From The Week
Here’s everything we published this week:
I love HubSpot’s Website Grader, and it’s success speaks for itself. I also generally love the idea of giving value before you ask for value, and so I wanted to replicate something like that for XaaS Pricing. I don’t have any coding chops, much less those of HubSpot’s CTO, the formidable Dharmesh Shah, so we chose to go the free consulting route. We’ll be digging into the first submissions over the next week, so stay tuned for the results!
Ultimate Guide to SaaS Pricing Research
Building SaaS is a completely new exploration for me. Conducting pricing research is not. There’s a lot of connectivity between the two, obviously, for XaaS Pricing. So I wanted to share some thoughts from the last 10+ years of pricing research, with a focus on how research can apply to all businesses, regardless of size, stage, and business ingress.
The Definitive SaaS Pricing Models Guide
The hottest SEO topic in SaaS pricing, based on Google search and keywords research, is pricing models. There are many listicle-style guides out there on SaaS pricing models. I find that most of them are a hodge-podge of pricing strategy topics, but not pricing models. In this guide, I use our XaaS Pricing taxonomy as a framework for a new, structured, better way of thinking about SaaS pricing models.
I stumbled across this yesterday, and it’s a revelation. GitLab has a public strategy steering document that goes through their pricing model, with a deep focus on why they do what they do, and what choices they are considering. It’s a really valuable window into how a leading SaaS thinks about pricing strategy.
This Week In XaaS Pricing
In our own XaaS Pricing backyard, pricing changes remain a key data exploration. In our last weekly update, we tracked 10 companies that made pricing changes. We believe one of the key values of XaaS Pricing will be its ability to gather and measure price level and strategy changes over time, serving as the Wayback Machine for all things pricing.
To that point - if you compete or track Buffer, Cloudflare, Harness, Grafana Labs, Livestorm, Groove, Scale AI, Snyk.io, or Yardi, you might want to check out their pricing page.
There were two interesting pricing stories that caught my eye in the news this week:
Etsy sellers protesting price hikes
I wrote about Patreon a few weeks back, and touched on very similar themes that are at play here. The big picture for me comes back to distribution channels, and unbundling opportunities. Etsy controls the distribution platform, their costs are rising, and they intend to price for that. Creators have agency to disrupt the distribution model, as do other potential entrants that can unbundle the marketplace for specific domains and/or customer profiles.
AriZona Iced Tea will never not be 99 cents a can
Favorite story of the week. Hands down. I’ve been an AriZona Iced Tea fan and customer for years. The net of it is - they intend to never change their 99 cents per can pricing, which has been in place for 30 years. This is a great example of designing a brand around the pricing, and they are committed to it. Short-term, it impacts their profitability, long-term, it reinforces a brand promise. Sometimes lifetime deals can work.
XaaS Pricing Startup Musings
This week is about the Pricing Page Grader, and broadly, about things that don’t scale. That’s basically all we’ve been doing as we ramp up our marketing efforts. Making one-to-one connections, answering questions on Reddit and other social media sites, and now, the Pricing Page Grader.
One of the best parts about doing things that don’t scale - they are fun!
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 :)