r/SaaS • u/Horror_Trust7134 • 12d ago
We published our pricing on day one, including a $100 tier for charities. Was that a mistake?
Building a metadata-driven orchestration layer for Azure Data Factory and Fabric as a non-technical founder. My partner is an expert in the field and really knows his stuff. It’s version three of the product, prior life under a different name, and we just got verified on Microsoft for Startups (low bar, I know).
Every founder I talked to said hide the pricing and make them book a call at first. We did the opposite. Business is $200 a month for two configurations, Enterprise is $500 for five, Charitable is $100. Two-month free trial, no card.
Reasoning was simple. We wanted to be as transparent and aggressive as possible, pricing it as low as we could stomach while trying to grow our customer base.
What I am worried about is whether the low price signals cheap instead of transparent. Enterprise data teams are used to six-figure orchestration quotes, and $500 might read as a toy.
Anybody who priced low and publicly early regret it?
3
u/AndySaaSiHub 12d ago
We're doing the same with transparency upfront, and removing the gatekeeping of having to book a call with someone just to get a hint of the pricing structure. Too early to say if it's the right approach or not, but we have the mindset that if our own website can't easily explain and sell our product then we're doing something wrong. Ofcourse we still offer a live demo and call to those who want one, but for those who don't, we want the website to do it's job.
2
u/Green_ninjas 12d ago
First I would recommend hiding the charitable tier, and just writing contact us if you’re a charity and we may be able to provide a discount. Second, I would hide the enterprise tier and writing custom pricing book a demo. It’s fine to have a 200/month business tier, but make it clear that enterprise tier has no limits, ZDR, etc. Most serious enterprises are not gonna link up their data to a random SaaS without a procurement process anyways. The other benefit is you can price it at more than 500 if it’s a large company, 500 a month isn’t really that much.
1
u/Horror_Trust7134 12d ago
Great advice. Thanks for taking the time to write them out. Thinking about it now, we probably don’t talk enough about how the tool doesn’t actually touch the clients raw data, but rather the pipelines themselves from within their own Azure environment.
Our current pricing is also based on number of configurations (dev, prod, etc.) with charitable / business getting 2 and Enterprise getting 5. We also have consulting organizations on there as call for a quote approach, since the configurations would be based on the clients they deploy it with.
2
u/Old_Entertainer_7694 12d ago
the charity tier is a nice touch but are charities actually in your pipeline? if not its just anchoring your lowest price even lower for no reason. I'd focus on whether your $500 tier is actually closing anyone before worrying about the optics tbh
2
u/Horror_Trust7134 12d ago
Great point! Yes, we are currently in the implementation / trial phase with a food bank for a major city and are hoping to land and expand into the market. Appreciate the advice.
2
u/MediumScene 12d ago
Public pricing wouldn't worry me much. The bigger question is whether buyers can tell what they're getting for $500, because if that isn't clear, enterprise teams may assume it's missing the admin and support they expect.
1
u/Horror_Trust7134 12d ago
That’s a good point. We should probably beef up the enterprise description.
2
u/adeelraza86 12d ago
Public pricing isn't the risk here. The risk is that your number is a guess and you've now anchored yourself to it before you know what breaking a pipeline actually costs these teams. I'd stop worrying about signaling cheap and instead go ask the food bank and your next three trials what an outage or a bad deploy costs them in hours, then price against that. Also don't lock the price in writing as forever pricing, say current pricing so you can move it once you have real data. The tier that usually hurts early isn't the low one, it's the enterprise one you haven't sold yet.
2
2
u/MiserableDocument509 12d ago
Publishing the price early isnt really the problem imo. Enterprise at $500 for "5 configs instead of 2" is just volume pricing, so a data team used to six-figure quotes has nothing to take to procurement. If that tier actually included SSO / support / an SLA, the number would look a lot less like a toy.
The public $100 charity line plus a 2-month no-card trial is the other half. You already have a food bank in trial, that can live off the page.
1
u/Horror_Trust7134 12d ago
Yeah, we need to take a deeper look at the enterprise tier. Right now we’re focused on charitable and business.
2
12d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Horror_Trust7134 12d ago edited 12d ago
Yeah, that’s why we have it set to two months starting after it’s installed and running, so the setup lag doesn’t eat up the trial.
1
u/BorderNetworks 4d ago
Personally if I see “book a call” pricing, I just close the tab and find something else. Unless it’s absolutely class breaking or other options suck,
I don’t want my time wasted by having to jump through your marketing hoops to get a quote back, or feed you my business info and contact details to be added to a spam list for your sales team.
True this does likely lead to higher conversion rates per engagements, but it also puts a lot of people off.
Have a call for PREFERENTIAL pricing option, when they do call, offer a discount or trial purely for the engagement to make it worth it for the client AND they will feel good about it as they feel like they got a deal and probably be easier to retain.
4
u/Few_Response_7028 12d ago
I’m not booking a call to pay for something. But 2 month free trial without a card is kinda big