Watching the Watchmen and Watchwomen (in PLG)
An exploration of PLG stack pricing models
One of my best friends loves graphic novels, and he finally got me to read one recently. It happened to be Watchmen, which was probably an obvious place to start.
Long story short - I loved it, and I also devoured the amazing HBO mini-series based on the book that aired in 2019. It starred the incredible, unmatched Regina King and many other heavy-hitters; if you haven’t seen it, even if you haven’t read the novel, I highly recommend it.
There’s a quote from Watchmen that appears throughout the book: “who watches the watchmen?” In context of the story, it’s a meta-question about how we govern those that we empower to protect and manage us as a society. It turns out the quote originates from a Latin phrase - “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” first inked by Roman poet Juvenal in the first and second centuries A.D. So the quote has low churn (sorry).
Fast forward to present day - as we at XaaS Pricing have been immersing in the SaaS pricing world, we’ve observed the acceleration of “PLG enablement” as a new and high-growth SaaS category, rife with multiple sub-categories. Put broadly, these are companies that offer SaaS tools and solutions to help other SaaS companies facilitate end-to-end execution of PLG-rooted go-to-market models.
This week, courtesy of Krupesh Muthukumar of RevenueHero I stumbled over an excellent and comprehensive post by Dushyant Mishra that laid out the current “PLG enablement” landscape as he and colleagues see it. In it, they identified 109 companies comprising the “PLG enablement” stack (see below).
Here at XaaS Pricing, we are hard-wired to think about vendor pricing strategies. So this post got me thinking, “if these are the companies enabling PLG, how are they performing as PLG companies themselves?” Or more succinctly, “who watches the watchmen (of PLG)?”
You can probably guess what happened next. But I’ll tell you anyway. We started compiling the data on this landscape to see what story might lurk within it.
Many of these companies are either already included in our full XaaS Pricing dataset or will be covered as part of our 2022 data collection efforts, so we’ll be building out our full data set of 55+ fields on each of these companies. But for this exercise, we focused on a limited set of data fields to (relatively quickly) try and answer three primary questions that we thought would give us a reasonable barometer on the PLG-ness of this peer set:
Is there a forever free plan available?
Does a pricing page exist, and if so, is pricing published?
What is the pricing model(s) used (i.e. is it usage-based)?
The verdict: PLG stack companies are kinda-sorta PLG.
I know, I know. “Kinda-sorta”. I feel the analyst cringe. But here’s what I mean:
Publishing pricing is a mixed bag. Just under two-thirds of this peer set publishes some level of price point information publicly. 22% provide no pricing or only tier details but no pricing info, and the rest either are in early access or require a form.
Companies in this group are more likely to not offer a forever free plan. It’s close; 56% have no free plan or don’t have any pricing or packaging information published, and 44% offer a free plan.
True usage-based models are limited. Pricing models ultimately vary by category. Most common is a flat-fee subscription with defined usage for each tier. Models that use this approach either price with a hybrid model consisting of a flat-fee charge plus a usage charge, or charge for usage based on overage. 18% are still using a variant of a seat-based model, and ~28% don’t publish pricing model or pricing information.
So see? Mixed bag. Ultimately what that really means is that the degree of PLG maturity and/or PLG-fit for this ecosystem varies by category (Kyle Poyar at OpenView wrote a really great post on PLG maturity recently - check it out). For example, 100% of design companies (Figma, etc.) in the list publish pricing. 60% of sales outreach firms (Gong, etc.) do not. This plays out similarly across the data fields we looked at for this exercise.
In addition to the above, I think there’s also story this data tells. Even in this space, where players are creating new categories and significant emphasis is placed on customer obsession (which don’t get me wrong, is the right place to be), there’s a lot of competitive tracking and alignment going on here. Even as you dig into the pages themselves, how landing forms and copy are used, you can see one competitor mirrored in another’s approach.
All that is to say that even for those on the cutting edge of SaaS GTM, enabling and facilitating PLG with software stacks, minding competitor pricing approaches still matters.
So to that end…we are going to dig into these companies much further in our way as we add them to the dataset. But we wanted to give those that might be interested the chance to do that now. So if you want to interrogate the data, it here’s for the taking:
PLG Stack Company Pricing Model Analysis (example below)
If you need a data cut or an export, send me a note at bryan@xaaspricing.com and we can figure something out! Happy Friday!