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Ask HN: My App's Pricing plans.

17 points by hajrice ↗ HN
Hey HN, I'm launching an SaaS app soon(description is below) and would like your opinion on the way we should go in terms of pricing.

Quick description of app: Questionify manages your site's FAQ page by letting your customers ask questions(no login required). Questions are placed into categories(which of course you can manage) and are displayed according to the view count. Customers can subscribe to questions(there's a "I had that question too!" button which encourages this).

Do you think we should do Freemium? How do you think pricing plans would be ok, based on number of users/questions?

Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

15 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] thread
thibaut_barrere
On freemium: I'd really follow the advice of "It is a numbers game, so bust out your Excel spreadsheet" (from http://gigaom.com/2010/03/26/case-studies-in-freemium-pandor...).

I would really try to understand how much a freemium user cost in your case, and how many (and which) premium users you would need to cover the free ones.

patio11
I would suggest not basing your pricing on costs. Instead, base it on the value your users will perceive from your service. On reason is that the per-user costs are likely to be too small for you to measure. (Pricing based on costs also auto-commoditizes your offering.)
thibaut_barrere
I second that actually, totally :)

I would just ensure that the freemium costs remain under control (that was the meaning I wanted to convey, at least).

arch_hunter
In my completely unprofesional opinion, and with absolutly no experiance in this area, I would advise you to skip freemium. I am guessing that if you go with freemium you are going to get a bunch of people using it who are just adding an FAQ to their freepages 'website' and are unable to or never plan to upgrade to a paid version. The money will probably be in going after big buisnesses, colleges, NPOs, etc. who want to find out what their customer's questions really are. (Or possibly you could have a freemium version that had advertisements in it, and have the ads pay for everything.)

I also recall seeing several people complain about how it is often those who are not paying for the service that cause the most customer service difficulties.

hajrice
haha yeah, dealing with customer that aren't really paying can be a pain. In fact, I'm going after businesses, focusing on B2B, so I agree with skipping freemium.
thibaut_barrere
My next SAAS app will be paid-only, at least at the beginning.
thibaut_barrere
Reading your comment I wondered what's the most common: paid or freemium ?

Based on the little current dataset from http://kingapi.com, we have 11 freemium and 8 paid (not sure how statistically relevant it is though).

ScottWhigham
The problem that I have with your question is that I'm having trouble what you mean when you suggest you base pricing on "number of users/questions". What does that mean? To me, as a webmaster, I start thinking, "Wait - do I have to know how many users are hitting my website or do they mean how many users can manage/edit the questions/answers?" It's a bit confusing.

I'm going to assume that you are thinking along the lines of "How many users the company appoints to edit/manage the entries." Okay - if that's the case then what happens if a big company (like MSFT) decides to try you out on 10 pages that have 1-2 editors? You might get tens of thousands of hits but still get the same revenue that a one-person site with 1k uniques a month gets you. Can you scale that?

I don't know - it's a tough slope but I think you have to put something in there to prevent DOS to other clients because you are fulfilling one big client's requests ten-fold over the others.

hajrice
Sorry, I didn't really define my question well. Basically by users I mean people that may edit the website. You have really good arguments. I don't really find this being fit for big companies, but I suppose one way of pricing would be by how much traffic your site gets which sort of directly imposes how much money your business is making. In my opinion this is by far the best way to go.
imp
Do you have any high-end premium features? Or are users and questions the only knobs you have turn?
hajrice
Well, you can brand your page using logos, colors. Another feature is you can upload screenshots along with pasting a youtube video link and we convert it into a video object.

Besides that, I guess stuff like live search etc.

[dead] pnelly
Hi, looks like something which should have a free/premium version. However, I don't think that you should limit the number of users/questions that can be asked by visitors. But extra features (such as metrics, customer subscription) should be charged for. This is only my opinion of course.
John212
Freemium may work if the free package has your logo/name and and a link back to your site on the users FAQ page.

If you get any reasonable volume on your free product, this could work well for your SEO & brand.