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Ask HN: How do you split your SaaS features into plans?

by jozi9 on 10/27/16, 1:39 PM with 2 comments

I'm doing a side project which purpose is to experiment if I can build a SaaS product and maybe earn some dollars. The app is a web-based REST api monitoring/tester tool, and I've been struggling with splitting features into packages that actually makes sense. The core features are like having API calls defined with parameters and assertions as cases, and then you can run them in every 1/5/15/60 minutes and get a report in email/slack if something went wrong. I have no experience on what works in real life so I'd appreciate any feedback from similar people who has done A/B testing or has any experience regarding this. My current idea is:

- Basic: max 1 user / max 5 case / 60 mins frequency

- Startup: max 5 users / max 100 case/ 5 minutes frequency

- Enterprise: unlimited users / unlimited case / 1 minutes frequency

And the main selling point for the most expensive plan would be an ability to run collections through an API so that it can be wired into CI build.

Any thougths? Thanks!

  • by dangrossman on 10/27/16, 3:03 PM

    IMO: For something B2B like this, plans are a way to segment your customers. Your solution might not be worth much to someone's side project, while it might be replacing an entire employee's worth of work for a larger company, saving them thousands of dollars a month.

    You might want your basic plan to do everything a solo developer or hobbyist needs, your middle plan to do everything a small shop or agency needs, and your top plan to do everything a household brand needs for example. Then price accordingly to the greater value and ability to pay each group has.

    Come up with the plans and price them according to that mindset. If the main thing that differentiates your customers is the number of users, or number of servers they run, or how many API calls they process, or what level of support they need... that's the metric you want to find and use to set your pricing. Not necessarily the technical parameters of your product. Maybe that "wiring into a CI" is the only thing that differentiates your customers, and you only need two plans.

    Decide on something and put it up. You can always change your pricing later (painlessly if you grandfather existing accounts) as you learn more from actual customers.

  • by petervandijck on 10/27/16, 9:00 PM

    Few thoughts:

    1. Add a fourth plan, call it "enterprise" (call your third plan Business or something), and add unlimited phone support as a differentiator. Don't put a price on it, say "call us".

    2. Your basic plans seems fairly useless to anyone, no API has only 5 assertions to test.

    3. How are you planning to price this? I would suggest 5$/mo, 79$/mo, $399/mo and call us