This month’s company update is focused entirely on pricing. Our goal is to share the process we used to come up with our pricing, to publicly share Outseta’s pricing for the first time, and to share our thinking and values around how we’d like to price our product well into the future.
Let’s start with our process.
When thinking about pricing, there are three useful barometers that we considered:
- Pricing based on persona
- Pricing based on the market or competitor pricing
- Pricing based on value delivered to the customer
Let’s tackle each of these one at a time.
Pricing based on persona
Considering our pricing based on the persona of our potential buyer was relatively easy - we are going to be selling to early stage, SaaS start-ups. We want our pricing to be accessible to bootstrapped companies (like ourselves). The companies we’ll be selling to may even be pre-revenue, so we know that they are going to be highly price sensitive.
On top of that, there are a slew of point solutions out there already targeting this buyer persona and it’s the norm for these products to be free or very inexpensive. Hubspot CRM, for example, is free. Mailchimp’s email marketing software is also free for up to 2,000 subscribers, with a cap on the number of emails that can be sent. You get the idea. This led us to...
Decision #1 - We wanted the eliminate the barrier to entry and allow companies to start using our product for free.
We think this is important in allowing us to effectively compete against the other point solutions in the market. Perhaps more importantly, we know that we’ll be competing against more established and better funded competitors - as a result, we’re designing our go-to-market strategy to keep customer acquisition costs as low as possible from the get-go. Rather than relying on a time-constrained free trial model with an inside sales team following up on those leads, we’re going to focus on building a product qualified leads (PQL) model where users can access the software for free and essentially qualify themselves based on their engagement level with our product.
Pricing based on the market or competitor pricing
Pricing Outseta against the market or our competitors was a bit trickier, as we had to look at the overall cost of a handful of point solutions against the cost of our platform. There were countless permutations, but here’s a pretty representative view.
*This table does not include subscription billing pricing
Let’s start by acknowledging the above table is imperfect - these companies all price their products based on different value metrics and have different thresholds for users, contacts, customers, etc. Beyond that we’re not talking about complete parity of features or functionality.
All we’re trying to do here is illustrate that there are countless different permutations, options, and prices… and I think the table speaks for itself in showing that it’s very easy for a start-up to lose sight of what they’re actually paying at any given point in time for the combination of point solutions they select. Which led to...
Decision #2 - We wanted our pricing to represent a great value against even the least expensive combination of these point solutions. This is important because we won’t offer true feature parity; just the basic, core functionality that a start-up actually needs (we don’t and will never support emoticons, sorry). And we wanted our pricing to be easy to understand so you’re never surprised when you look at your bill.
Pricing based on value delivered to the customer
More than anything, we wanted our pricing to be based on value delivered to the customer. We think this is simply good business and if our customers are truly getting significant value out of our product they will have no problem paying us for it. The difficulty here was deciding on how we can measure value delivered to the customer - what was our value metric going to be? With such a broad range of functionality within our product it could be anything from number of users, contacts, customers, revenue, support tickets answered, or emails sent.
We initially came to the conclusion that users was the value metric that made the most sense. As a start-up begins to grow, they inevitably need to give more salespeople access to their CRM, more customer service people access to their support ticketing system. What our customers pay us should scale up in parallel with the growth of their business, and users felt like a more real-world indication of growth than simply growing the number of “contacts” in your database.
That said, we are a new email marketing provider and need to be cognizant of building a strong “sender reputation.” Basically what this means is we need to safeguard ourselves from bringing on companies that will try to use our platform to send email broadcasts to large lists of people who did not give them permission to email them. When this happens the emails inevitably have high bounce and complaint rates, which in turn hurts our sender reputation and lowers the deliverability rates of our email marketing tools. This risk led us to...
Decision #3 - Our value metric is going to be a blended model of both users and contacts, because both the number of users and the number of contacts should naturally grow as a start-up gains traction, begins to hire more people, and begins to market to more folks. Our plan is to give our users more than enough contacts for the stage that they are at, but to provide some sort of cap in the vein of building a strong sender reputation and ensuring our email marketing tools aren’t abused.
Outseta’s Pricing - Where did we end up?
Reviewing the above decisions, we know that we wanted to…
- Offer a free plan so there’s no barrier to entry to get started with Outseta.
- Offer a fantastic value, even in comparison to the least expensive combination of point solutions. And have an easy to understand pricing structure so you always know what you’re being charged.
- Use a blended model of users and contacts as our value metric to effectively mirror the traction and growth of a start-up.
Without further adieu, here’s a link to our first pricing page.
Let’s unpack this a little bit - everybody who wants to use Outseta will start on our “Founder’s Plan” which is free forever for 1 user and up to 500 contacts. This is not a time constrained free trial, or a limited functionality offering - you’ll get access to all of our features until you outgrow this plan. As a small, bootstrapped start-up ourselves we’ve been working on Outseta for six months now and would still be on this plan - we wouldn’t have paid a penny, and we think that makes sense given our stage.
Eventually as we start bringing on more salespeople, more support users, whatever it may be we’ll need to scale up. Or maybe we’ll simply have grown our database beyond the 500 contact limit. Whatever the trigger is, the price is the same - you’ll pay $30/mo (billed annually) for an additional user which includes 2,000 additional contacts. Free to start, easy to understand, and it scales with growth.
Now, let’s look at how our pricing scales as a start-up grows versus that least expensive combination of point solutions (Hubspot CRM, Groove, MailChimp, Profitwell).
Total Price Per Month - Outseta vs. Point Solutions
We think any way you cut it, Outseta is a great deal.
What we think we got right and what we’re not sure about
Any time you release a new product into the market for the first time you’re taking an educated guess at best in terms of how the market will respond to your pricing. Despite the fact that we’ve given this a lot of thought (enough to devote a 2000+ word blog article to it), that is absolutely true in our case as well. There are three things that we feel really good about that we haven’t discussed yet.
- We’re giving a 25% discount for selecting an annual versus monthly plan. While the dollar amounts here are small, that’s a significant discount. We’re selling to start-ups, which we know is a population that will naturally have a high churn rate. As such, we want to incentivize people to make that larger commitment to our platform which will help us raise our average customer lifetime value (ACLTV).
- Despite the fact that we already win on price for the price sensitive customer, we think our customers will realize enormous value from gaining a single, “360 degree” view of their customers. They’ll be able to better understand their customers and their business, which is imperative to an early stage start-up.
- Our customers will also realize significant savings in terms of time spent evaluating, integrating, and maintaining a handful of point solutions. Over time the cost of these activities becomes, very, very real in terms of employee time. Your VP of Engineering has better things to do.
All of that said, we do have a mild worry which was rightfully raised by Patrick Campbell of Price Intelligently in his article Stop Per User SaaS Pricing You’re Killing Growth. In short the point that Patrick makes is if your pricing is tied to the number of users, then companies will try to limit the number of users to limit their costs. If you think about it, you should want everybody possible to be using your software because that increases the stickiness of your product and makes the customer less likely to churn. We absolutely buy that and it’s something we’ll monitor closely going forward, but our thinking is that with our blended model companies that are growing will either need to genuinely add more users or increase their number of contacts.
Conclusion
All things considered, we’d betcha we didn’t get our pricing perfectly “right” this first time around. Almost nobody does. FrontApp published an article we found useful on derisking your pricing strategy that gives an interesting perspective on the path they took to optimize their pricing. It’s worth the read and started an internal discussion amongst our team around the commitments we’d like to make to our customers when it come to pricing.
We know that we don’t want to be the company that nickle and dimes you, raising prices every time a new feature is delivered. We also don’t want to be the bait and switch company, whose prices start out low and then increase almost every year in an effort to keep up with investor’s revenue expectations. But we do want to reserve the right to experiment with our pricing consistently; it’s too important not to. Our thinking is simply that as we run future pricing experiments, we’ll do so only for new customers and will honor the pricing that our customers originally signed up for. Across the board pricing changes will be very few and far between.
So now to put the ball in your court… what do you think? If you are someone who has purchased the point solutions we’ve reference in this article or just someone who has thought quite a bit about pricing SaaS products, we’d love to get your take. Please share you thoughts with us via a comment below.
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