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Ask HN: Pricing B2B for Self-Serve SaaS

4 points by curo ↗ HN
How do you price a B2B product for self-serve? I.e., what's the upper range for products that can be added to a business credit card without going through procurement?

The "SaaS valley of death" is that zone where a product is priced too cheaply to justify a sales team (e.g., <$25k/year) but too expensive for credit cards (e.g., $5k/year). So presumably the upper range is around $400 a month?

But that sounds theoretical and I'm curious to hear from those who have had real, trial-by-error experience playing in this upper SaaS pricing range.

5 comments

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ajeet_dhaliwal
Based on my experience you can go higher than $5K / year on a card, definitely to just under $10K and possibly even a little more than that.
curo
ok thanks, great data point. In your experience, does that coincide with the max before it has to go through procurement, legal, etc?
codegeek
I run a b2b saas. We have clients who pay anywhere from 6k-15k per year on credit cards on average. We do have option to send a physical check or manual invoice/wire but has never been an issue.

You will be surprised about upper limits on credit cards. But it is more US centric as our european clients prefer bank transfer for larger amounts.

curo
Thanks for the feedback. Interesting, do you require multiple calls to get them across the line? I guess I presumed if you could put it on the company credit card, we'd go from 4-6 calls down to 1 call or 0 calls.
codegeek
sorry I didn't respond earlier. So yes it depends on the client and not so much about the Amount. For example, small/mid sized businesses where the decision maker is just 1 person, we sometimes get them to pay through credit card right away (even amounts like 20K). But sometimes we deal with larger companies and for the same amount, we have to deal with tons of red tape including procurement software and what not. So it is not so much about the actual amount but the type of client.