Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
The Saddest SaaS Pricing Pages of the Year (priceintelligently.com)
171 points by pccampbell on Jan 2, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 82 comments



At least they HAVE pricing pages. Quickest way to lose a potential sale (and all future potential sales and references) is to not provide pricing information because you're stuck in the sales-rep model where I have to call/email/otherwise contact you when all I want is an estimate so I know if I'm looking at a trivial-dollars-a-year or a reorganize-the-entire-budget-to-pay-for-this product/service.


Either everyone that does this is an idiot (unlikely) or it actually works for their markets and increases their bottom line (likely).

I once worked for a fairly big (500m-1b market cap) company that worked this way. Pricing was customized for every client. They, like many companies, made a ton of money doing this.

One down side, however, was that this business model can trap you. Once you've sold customers at lots of different price points, you can never go back and publish pricing, since those customers that are overpaying will be upset. You could set your prices high, but that would turn off many new customers who need a lower price point. So, while you can make a lot of money doing this, give it some thought before committing to it.

This is why Google Adwords is so genius. It's both dynamic (charging more for bigger pockets) and it scales, which is hard balance to strike.


> Either everyone that does this is an idiot (unlikely) or it actually works for their markets and increases their bottom line (likely).

Yep. I've been in start-ups where via simple pricing we drained the well for all other players, grabbing everything for ourselves. I've also been in start-ups where we found out that simple come-to-us pricing simply does not work and they needed an active sales rep process for the majority of the customers. (And if the majority need it, sorry, we can't just display prices. Losing the sale to you is worth keeping the other 90% of our sales.)


With on demand pricing and instant sign up, your lead may already be your competitor's customer before their first phone call.

I view Adwords more as a marketplace than a service. Its pitting customers against each other for what is naturally a finite inventory. There is some more opaque custom pricing going on in the background that nullifies some of the true market dynamics, but I wouldn't quite call it shill bidding on Google's behalf.

The did create a very fluid and dynamic market by (mostly) removing the sales people from the process. They need no applause for this, because it makes it waaaaaay easier to buy massive quantities of advertising from them successfully over a long period of time.


> With on demand pricing and instant sign up, your lead may already be your competitor's customer before their first phone call.

Sorry, but it just doesn't work this way. My company was bought by one of those companies that doesn't list pricing up front. There's never been a case where a single person could unilaterally decide to purchase their services.

What "Call us" means is "Send us an RFP (Request for Proposal) and we'll submit a bid". Why does this work? Shareholder or government policies usually require due diligence in the form of several competing bids. That means the potential customer has an incentive to contact as many providers as they can find and send them an RFP.

Ultimately the submitted bid is deliberated on by committee and several presentations might be required before a decision is made. You might think that I'm talking about massive deals for something like contracts for infrastructure or fighter jets, but no, I'm talking about simple SaaS.

It costs a lot to sell to these companies/organizations. The bids are usually hundreds of pages long, stating everything from features to datacenter security. Companies like Rackspace helpfully provide well written documents for this purpose, but you still have to write a lot on your own. The upshot is that thanks to the sales process the prices are inflated and frankly I see more money change hands over a month than I ever did in a whole year as a startup (a startup that was profitable and growing, no less).


> Once you've sold customers at lots of different price points, you can never go back and publish pricing, since those customers that are overpaying will be upset.

That seems easily solvable by giving those customers a discount to the price you want to set across the board (which is likely to make them happy), waiting a few months, and then implementing the pricing changes.


Sure, but that means you lose the revenue from being able to charge them more (obviously) and it also means the customer still knows that you weren't giving them your best price all along.


That's where you always bury key features to business (AD/LDAP integration) in a "call me" plan. That way you grab the early adopters with purchasing cards and get the service implanted in the customer's business process.


Agreed. It's a bit of a tradeoff. Definitely companies that need to hold prices in, but I'd venture that a lot of mid market companies that are opaque about their pricing should actually be more transparent.

Good rule of thumb - more custom product or custom customer, then more customer/opaque pricing.

You can still do much better than a "contact us for pricing" page though.


Quickest way to lose a sale is to provide pricing to non-expert buyers who are not likely to understand key parts of your product just from reading about it on the site. We have customers who are used to paying $5 bucks/mo for a shitty website; it takes some convincing for us to get them to pay us 10-20x more(for a much better product). If we simply put up the pricing on the site, we'd scare them away and never even get to speak with them.


This.

And even when you're the only game in town, a ten minute conversation can do a much better job of helping the genuine prospect choose the $700/month plan over the $250/month plan than a couple of bullet points on a feature list. And a clients that wouldn't quibble at a quote of $2000/month for the version that does everything they think they need are a lot more likely to do so when a brightly coloured matrix points out they could get away with paying $200 if they didn't want the Excel export...

Frankly, if customers are choosing their plan from a price/feature list rather than receiving a quote based on an assessment of the level of service they need to maximise their returns on using your product, the service isn't really priced on the basis of value.


This may work for some customers but on the flip side this is what I encounter:

- I am given a fixed budget to implement something. (I work for the government so I spend millions of dollars a year, but budgeting is done once a year so I go into a project knowing I have $100k to spend.)

- Find that all the prospective vendors in a field are hidden pricing.

- I end up filling out the "contact us for pricing" forms on a dozen websites.

- I field calls from a dozen salespeople, who don't want to give even approximate pricing until they've done at least a demo and a second conference call.

- When I get to pricing 8 of those 12 are prima facia more than we can afford (see fixed budget above)

- I've just wasted 20-30 hours of my time and 2-3 hours of each vendors time learning about and examining products that I now know I can't afford. Plus there are always several salespeople that don't give up. (I've had salespeople continue to prospect me even after an RFP with published results and purchase from another vendor.)

I remember doing ID Management. We ended up doing Novell at about $60k. But I remember when we got to the pricing stage with another vendor and got a price on the order of $750k. That's 1/3 of the entire departmental budget including salaries and benefits. If I know some amount of pricing going in, I wouldn't have wasted their time.


You weren't a waste of their time. You gave them the opportunity to have a worthwhile conversation with a potential customer. Ideally, if you were talking to a useful salescritter, you came away with a takeaway or two in addition to "Scratch them off the list."

It didn't pan out, but some percentage of leads not panning out is baked into the model.


"It didn't pan out, but some percentage of leads not panning out is baked into the model."

This is called a Purchase funnel (or Sales Funnel)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_funnel


I think the problem here is as much poorly-trained sales people than the practice of not disclosing pricing on the website. Smart sales people should be trained to recognize different types of buyers. From the sound of it, you are a buyer who knows exactly what he wants and just needs the price. Sales at our company would recognize this very early on and get you the info that you need minus the typical sales pitch. We specifically train our reps spot out buyers like you and handle them differently.

For example, if a buyer sounds highly technical from the beginning(or if they use certain buzz words), the sales reps will transfer to me so I can have a more nuanced conversation.


When you buy a 60-750k product, your time is free. The same goes if you are selling a 60-750k product.

It's the difference between buying a coffee, and buying a house. You wouldn't buy or sell a house without spending a bit of time on it.

And it's even better value for the vendors (and some customers), because their marginal costs are very low. They can offer a discount to some buyers, and give high prices to less cost sensitive ones.


When I get to pricing 8 of those 12 are prima facia more than we can afford (see fixed budget above)

We ended up doing Novell at about $60k. But I remember when we got to the pricing stage with another vendor and got a price on the order of $750k.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that pricing is fixed.

It's not. If the vendors have some idea of your budget they can tailor the offering to you a lot better.


The two examples you gave were about maximizing your returns by tricking your customers into buying things they don't need, not "maximis[ing] their returns on using your product" or "pric[ing] on the basis of value".

edit: typo


This seems to be a softspoken opinion on this thread, but I definitely agree. Would love to see data on different products and the results of their pricing strategy. I think the major differentiator is SaaS that is sold in bulk (the entire company will start using the service after the buying decision is made) versus single license from a user that is making a buying decision only for themselves. The data could help to show how SaaS relates to a long tail distribution, where the tail is made up of the sort of single license purchases I mentioned.

Also, what the article doesn't talk about is Free Trial options. This might not really be related to pricing pages in general, but are definitely important to how buying decisions are made.


Agreed that some products (a lot in enterprise software or consulting) require a more buttoned up pricing strategy, but if you serve the mid-market at all you should at least provide them some sort of signpost. "Here's what a project sort of looks and here's where the price starts"

With good design you can make it happen. You'll actually help the sales process 10x, because you'll get rid of the tire kickers and people who are just sort of interested.


Well, you know that a company is trying to take you for all that they can when the first line of questioning from them is focused on how big your budget is / how much money you're willing to spend on them. This is par for the course for many companies that are on a sales-rep model.


This is par for the course for many companies that are on a sales-rep model.

The best inside sales ops do not allow this because when you do this at scale, you find out that customers will realize the true value of your product over time and if you significantly overcharged them at the time of signing up, you will lose trust, have trouble renewing and getting referrals. So grossly overcharging just because they are willing to pay is generally a poor business decision.

The fly-by-night operations are more likely to do what you are saying but fly-by-night ops aren't limited to sales-rep model.


I'm in violent agreement with this. If I have to call you to get a price, I've already moved on.


It works backwards too: If having to call me to get a price makes you move on, you wouldn't afford me anyway.


Not necessarily. I've worked on projects where a high six figure yearly price tag was "trivial money". It still took approvals from several steps up the line, but they were the rubber-stamp variety once something was seen as necessary for the project. Many of those decisions were based on "here's a handful of options, there's others we can follow up on if none of these are satisfactory" conversations. Anyone that required contacting them for a ballpark estimate ended up in the second group, and as often as not were not even considered.


Well, I might have $10k - $20k/year to spend, but not have $100k/year to spend. This isn't the difference between someone looking at a $10k product with a $50 budget. Lots of time these Sales Rep Funnels are just there to put you in contact with a sales rep that will try to upsell you on anything that they can, even if you don't need it.

[redacted] was such a company. We could not buy (well 'lease' as it's software) the product without agreeing to also purchase training sessions for end-users from them. Even trying to get developers to talk to technical people (so the product could be evaluated) had to be mediated by a sales person so that they could inject their pitches (and up-sells) whenever possible on the conference call.

Edit: Pulling the name just to avoid possible issues. I'll just say that it was a company selling a data warehousing / business intelligence product that a company I worked for needed to use a small portion of to fulfill some contractual obligations (i.e. purchased a company, and needed to port their 100% Microsoft stack over to their 100% OSS stack while retaining feature parity for the acquired company's only customer -- a major Hollywood studio).


This is how my calls with Akamai usually go. The last one was how they tried to sell us ~$50K in DDOS prevention services that Cloudflare does for $200/month. Insert "Are you fing kidding me" face here during call


[deleted]


And the point is to appeal to multiple customer segments. You can always offer custom plans over the phone and advertise that option alongside the more affordable plans you display on your page.


"you wouldn't afford me anyway"

Yes, and included in this price is the Sales person doing a sales pitch in site, the mountains of reports and price proposals, the hours of conference calls, the kickbacks to whoever makes the decisions and a nice margin so that the price can be negotiated

And unless you're doing something really, really hard you're overpriced anyway


Who says it's a choice between publishing the price on a public webpage and forcing the user to make the call?

The "Get free trial/demo/brochure" link to a contact form works fine: that way the company gets to decide whether they want to call you or send a form email with pricing/signup information. In theory a service like Eloqua could even automate who gets a link to the pricing page and who gets a call from the sales rep, although I suspect salespeople generally have better judgement on what looks like a good lead.

And in the mid-high priced B2B market, if you move on without leaving an email/telephone number your enquiry probably wasn't serious enough to warrant giving you a price.


Sounds like there's a market for me to employ people in the third world to call/email companies who don't publish their prices and then for me to publish that info (Think Glassdoor.com for SaaS services without transparent pricing).


It's practically the raison d'etre for third party subscription agents that already exist, although their business model revolves around actually handling the purchasing part and charging a fee for it. I guess your alternative: flat rate access to a well structured general price list of software, data services and biz intel products would have some value to some BigCorp purchasing specialists, but would it cover the costs of putting it together?

It's also pretty easily ignored at the high end of the market where salespeople won't quote anybody without a proper telephone conversation and/or valid company email, and will claim every package is highly customised (even if it isn't). Even at the low end it's easily dismissed as "out of date", "inaccurate" or "for a different service we've discontinued"... and believe me I've had that conversation plenty of times about third party guesstimates of product prices when those excuses were actually true


I'm the same way. Why even have a website if after looking at the site for twenty minutes to get some idea, even a ballpark of pricing, you're going to try and push me to call/email someone to get a price quote??

Nothing gets me more annoyed than companies and their sites that do this. It's completely the opposite reason for having a website in the first place. DUH


They do this because they are signalling that they're not interested in your business. They are interested in the business of companies that can afford to pay someone to go through the dance of reaching out and setting up a call to learn about pricing.


Haha. Good way to put it. Feel the same way. We talked more about it here: "Why Your Secret Pricing Strategy is Overrated" - http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180265/Why-Your-...


Wow. COMPLETELY agree. Transparency is key in optimizing your sales funnel.

Check this post out where we talk about it a bit, as well: http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180265/Why-Your-...


I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think patio11 would say that if you care about this, you can't afford him/it anyway. I'm just playing the devil's advocate.


Yea. Keep in mind that patio11 is playing in more of the enterprise software space with consulting. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ has pricing loud and proud.

A LOT of SaaS companies think they're the former when in reality they're the latter.


So I guess I have to comment on this now.

I was once in the "hidden prices are for silly businesses" camp. I've matured in my understanding of this over the years. You'll note that I sell many things, some of which have sticker prices which you can see on the Internet and some of which are priced by "I pick a number from the set of the reals and if you don't like it then let's talk a bit."

If our businesses can reach a mutual understanding of what is being bought and sold without two people talking to each other, sure, let's go with a sticker price. I mean that both in terms of "what it physically is" and "what it is going to do for your business." That's a product. Maybe the offering won't exactly work for your needs or capture all of the available upside, but the great part about taking the expensive Human Attention component out of the loop is that it will be very attractively priced.

You'll note that at the moment I have products (for very different people) selling from everywhere from $9.99 to $2,497 to "$200 a month".

There are some situations, though, where low-touch or medium-touch sales is not quite enough to reach a meeting of the minds between both parties on what they want to get out of the deal. Then we get to high-touch sales. Many intuitions from low-touch sales go out the window then.

I used to do consulting. At the end of my career $30k was a pretty typical week rate for me. The last proposal I ever wrote had 7 figures attached to it. You can reasonably guess that it was not simply "50 weeks at $20k each" for somebody who looked like my typical clients with me doing my typical thing. You can also reasonably guess that "This proposal represents approximately 2X the lifetime billings of my company" would not have been to my advantage if I had stickered it on the website prior to entering the negotiations. (Don't probe for details on this anecdote, please, as it is brought to you by the letters N, D, and A and the number $LOTS.)

Back before I quit consulting, I was publicly available for it but publicly coy about what it would cost. If j.random@example.com wrote me "Hey Patrick, We want to hire you, what would that cost?" I'd get in touch with them and feel them out a bit about what they do and how they were envisioning working together. Occasionally that would mean that I was talking to somebody who couldn't possibly pay any rate I'd consider working at. Sometimes they'd say, after talking for 15 minutes or an hour, "Whoa, you could have saved me some time if you had just quoted that at me. I'll never pay it." Being told this a dozen or a hundred times is worth preserving the option value of being in the solution set for the Fortune 500 or allowing my rates to move faster than common intuition says is reasonable as my demonstrable achievements and changing client base began to allow it.

Also, published pricing versus private pricing is not a value judgment about people who can't afford (or otherwise won't purchase) the thingies on offer. "Moving from private pricing to published pricing will make us more money" is a testable proposition. It is, for some offerings, testably false. Some people passionately believe that it is true in a way which confounds refutation by numbers. Oh well. At least some people believe that about many things. In general, numbers still win.


Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. I appreciate it. I hope you don't mind my original comment.

> Being told this a dozen or a hundred times is worth preserving the option value of being in the solution set for the Fortune 500 or allowing my rates to move faster than common intuition says is reasonable as my demonstrable achievements and changing client base began to allow it.

I didn't understand this sentence. Could someone explain what this means to me?


Sorry, that sentence is terribly written. Let me try to express it in separate thoughts:

Hidden pricing will inevitably create some circumstances where a lead and I spend a bit of time talking to each other despite that lead not being a great fit for my services. From my perspective, this is OK, because if I were to unhide my prices it would make it impossible for me to do things like pitch BigCo on a million dollar engagement, which is valuable to me. Unhiding prices would also limit my flexibility in changing them. Over the 2.5 year course of my consulting career they went from $100 an hour to $30k a week, often with discontinuous jumps between engagement N and engagement N+1. Clients who were prepared to pay the price I quoted N+1 might be less inclined to pay it if they were aware that, mere days earlier, I had been charging the rate I charged for engagement N for what might, to that client, feel like "the same" thing.


I believe: "Whoa, you could have saved me some time if you had just quoted that at me. I'll never pay it." being an acceptable frequent response to be able to charge quite a large amount of money to larger clients (Fortune 500 Patrick mentions).

Allowing him ALSO, to set his rates continually higher then one would expect (fast-growth of pricing, from 20k/week to six figures).

So, it was "ok" to have a "wasted" conversation between parties who couldn't afford his rates, to be able to continually raise his rates for those that could afford it. While, not publishing this pricing, and creating his own ceiling.


> Don't probe for details on this anecdote, please, as it is brought to you by the letters N, D, and A and the number $LOTS.

Then don't tell us the story. You signed an NDA.

You've created a persuasive, socially powerful HN persona (and I'm sure your consulting income thanks you for it), but at what cost? To gain authority you need to make claims for it and back it up with evidence, otherwise nobody cares. So bragging comes with the territory. To keep up your reputation you are forced to write phrases like "Fortune 500" or "7 figures." No problem.

I'm not criticizing you for it. I'm curious. You obviously made a personal choice to engage in personal branding, so why'd you do it? Does it feel liberating to be so open? Or does it feel tiresome, like you're trapped on a treadmill powering your reputation?


I have to counterpoint this as well. It doesn't work for everyone. I'm paying the bills by myself by appealing to the businesses that want SLAs, purchase orders, etc. Everyone usually wants something custom for them. Different scales of customers want different things. In a way I prefer the high touch model to an extent if only because of the fact I get to learn about the problems the business is solving. Bulk/cheap SaaS typically CAN (not always) cause more support costs for less margins (depending on how you're staffed). I think for the primary audience here the advice is very applicable though.


>I have to call/email/otherwise contact you when all I want is an estimate so I know if I'm looking at a trivial-dollars-a-year or a reorganize-the-entire-budget-to-pay-for-this product/service.

"If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it."

Seriously though, if you have to contact a salesperson, it's likely that the product is a "reorganize-the-entire-budget-to-pay-for-this product" type of service. Ergo, if that isn't appealing to you, you aren't the target market, and therefore a waste of time to them. This assumes a "smart" approach as nostromo mentions, of course.

I'll add the caveat that I see several "idiot" approaches to this simply because the "talk to our sales rep" approach is the default in many industries, particularly B2B. You can often hear it expressed as "If we publish our prices, our competitors will know them too!". In my industry - insurance - I've seen 6 figure sales consultants involved in week long sales processes that make us $200 in revenue a year. That's not "smart" at all.

There isn't a 'right' approach, but it depends entirely on the product being sold and the target market whose needs are being addressed.


> In my industry - insurance - I've seen 6 figure sales consultants involved in week long sales processes that make us $200 in revenue a year. That's not "smart" at all.

And that's exactly how GEICO and Progressive were able to come out of nowhere to capture 18% of the automobile insurance market. By using direct sales, they can replace the insurance agent's 10% commission with hourly call-center employees in low-wage states.

In fact, GEICO is now getting very close to knocking Allstate out of its perennial #2 position. Who would've thought, ten years ago?

Private passenger automobile premiums written in 2012:

  1. State Farm   $32.10 billion   18.37% share
  2. Allstate     $17.48 billion   10.00%
  3. GEICO        $16.75 billion    9.58%
  4. Progressive  $14.44 billion    8.26%
http://www.naic.org/documents/research_top_25_market_share_p...


Lets suppose you're selling a B2B analytics product where the minimum commitment is $5K/month for 6 months. Using this product to maximum value will require some training QA, CS and possibly dev staff in your organization. Is there any chance that a customer would purchase this product without calling the vendor in person and probably arranging several meetings between the vendor and key stakeholders in the customer's company? More to the point, would the customer even consider purchasing the product unless they expected to get a 10X ROI on the investment? I don't see how publishing the price is advantageous at all to the vendor (since they want to price discriminate) or a dealbreaker for the customer (since they will have to reorganize to use the product and expect to get a massive return anyway).


As a buyer, I feel the same way. The business guy in the back of my head wonders how much business is really being lost by those companies.

Imagine the answer was always >$50k/year. Would said company ever have anybody click the "add to cart" button after browsing a website for a while? It could be that the missing price is just a signal that this is not that sort of business and if you're looking for something that doesn't require sales people, contracts and purchase orders, you're probably better off just looking elsewhere.

I suppose they could say that directly on the site, but even that might turn out to not be such a good idea.

Unless you test these sorts of things, you never really know.


I've got a story to one-up this one. At one company I worked for, I was actually told by marketing that the product datasheets were knowingly poor, so customers would have to call in to ask questions. Then they would try to upsell them.


Sounds like a great customer experience (sarcasm intended).

Coyness has it's place I suppose, especially when you're first starting out with your pricing or need to optimize for touch over scale. Hopefully they figured that out ASAP.


I don't know. As a SaaS buyer (occasionally) I have to take strong disagreement with some of the points. For instance the first two sites links--first bad, second good. Both show pricing structure, the "bad" one shows a feature list with a bunch of check boxes. I wish more vendors did this. I look at it and I know what I'm getting with the basic plan. I know what each increment buys me.

I look at the second example--the "good" example--and the basic plan looks like it gives me---nothing. So now I have to go to some other marketing page, read the description, then, in my head, subtract all the great things that higher tiers give me to figure out what exactly I'd get with the base tier. Having it all in one place is preferable to me. The second problem with the "good" site is by summarizing feature each plan comes with, rather than being more specific, they are assuming that they know what is important to me. What if I could care less (and this has happened to me several times) about some big picture feature, and just need the version that provides database X integration? More clicking, and more likelihood that I buy a higher specced plan that I actually need.

And that is where I think these come from. Not a desire clearly layout what you get for your money, but a desire to obfuscate just enough with requisite marketing to push you towards more expensive options.


http://i.imgur.com/LjJhc2Q.png

Anyone here ever been to Santana Row in San Jose? They have a GUCCI store in there; no prices are displayed for anything.

"If you have to ask, then we're too expensive for you."

It's like how most of us can generally walk into any Target Store or even Macy's(well, some of us) and just buy what we like without looking at the price.... or maybe this is just me.


I spoke to a friend the other day with a SaaS and they are aiming at the long-tail of sites as their customers, and they chose 1 price plan, regardless of how big the customer sites were. Their advisor said simplifying would reduce fear in customers, especially small businesses.

I've been considering a similar approach for a simple SaaS we run, which we have had trouble with getting traction for.


Hmmm. It really depends on the product/customer. The big thing here is that you don't have to have a perfect pricing strategy out of the gate (or ever); it's iterative.

Look at the Hootsuite example for instance - at this point with 8 million users they should really have more than one plan because there are several different personas in the mix.

Buffer on the other hand had a mono-price schema for a long time, because they wanted the simplicity while they were getting traction (to your point). Now that they're solid, they've been iterating the product and the pricing into their business plan.

Big points:

- Each customer persona = a pricing tier - Price based on the customer willingness to pay = talk to them about pricing - Iterate - your pricing should change as your product and customer do


I wish the blog had "fixed" each of the poor examples to show what they would have done.


And leave money on the table?

If it were my blog, I would have included a link to "Pay me to show you what I would have done differently", or some other equally organic and not-too-weasely way of selling exactly that service: Reporting on best and worst examples is one thing, relatively LHF, but working with a company to improve is something they should be rewarded for!

Not to mention that doing so may require a company to completely overhaul sales and marketing. Or culture. Or both.

LHF: Low hanging fruit, easily obtainable item.

EDIT: PCCAMPBELL was replying at the same time as me. I like their reply.


Ha! Well, I didn't want to be completely blatant. A lot of our content tells you how to solve the problem, but yes - we do have software and tech services to help you. Work with folks like New Relic, Insightly, Wistia, etc.


Good point. We touched on it a bit at least in concept, but we'll do better in the future about being more inclusive of the solution (just a lot of content for one post). Maybe pick one or two and breakdown and then build up a solution?

The ebook linked from the page has a lot on the right stuff to do.


Here's a little "growth hack" tip for you. Change this:

> As always though, if you need any help, even just a sounding board to chat things through with, we’re here to help.

To this:

> So what's the solution for all of these? We'll be following up in later blog posts, so <a>sign up for our newsletter</a>. Want the answers now? <a>Buy our book!</a> We cover all of these potential traps and more.

Also, spelling error: You’re making it harder to upsell me On the eight day Should be eighth.

Nice blog.


Ha. Touche.

Fixed the spelling error and added something a bit better in.

Thanks!


This is amazing, huge thanks for the analysis of our pricing page Patrick! Will go ahead and work on that for sure, some great pointers, you're right, there's so much power in the new analytics and we're not conveying that very well at all.


Yep, thanks for including Buffer here (I designed this pricing page) - there's lots of improvements to be made here which will be coming soon :)


Sounds good. Check out that ebook if you want a good survey of the land of pricing pages. Feel free to reach out too if you want a sounding board.


Thanks, homie.

LOVE you guys with all caps intended. I'd look to Wistia as a really good example for you guys. Your value metrics follow a similar slide up and you can use that extra space for what you do best - awesome content/product marketing.


Looks like Dyn has changed theirs; http://dyn.com/email-delivery-express/


Wow. This just happened, as I took the screenshot very early this morning. Not a big fan of the change in terms of clarity, but there's improvement in the product marketing around why their solution is better than Maildril, Amazon, etc.

Biggest thing I'm curious about from a data perspective concerns the science behind the thresholds they've set. You want to see where the break in usage or value is and make sure you capture 95% of that group. Power users of that plan are then pushed into the next plan accordingly.


For what it's worth, I got to that page by clicking "Email Delivery Express" via their dropdown from their homepage - http://dyn.com/

If you click the link in the article it still is the older version.


@StackMob there is no price and call to action button on your "pricing" sub page https://www.stackmob.com/pricing/ . I am confused.

https://twitter.com/daniel_sedlacek/statuses/415108372422094...


What does HN think of my pricing section on http://wesawit.com ? Any feedback?


Random, non-target-customer opinion: The slider is nice. However, it's not obvious how the venue size it selects (and the corresponding pricing tiers) affect the service offered. For example, what happens if I'm dishonest?

It seems like you're trying to tier the pricing based on a customer attribute (their venue size) rather than actual customer usage (ie their interest in value-added features, increased quota for certain features, etc). It seems hard to enforce, and also harder to upsell (ie if I'm a smaller fry, I'm never going to buy your premium plan). But I'm quite a bit out of my league here..


Good points; thanks.


I work at Wistia. Glad that we made it to the list of good pricing pages!


Nice! We're big fans. :)

Tell Brendan to stop grinding his coffee so loudly.

- Patrick


Thanks for the feedback on the Qualaroo pricing page, Patrick.


No worries. Love the product!


fotbr - nice observation. In my opinion, illusive (or non-existent) pricing pages only frustrate prospective customers and serve as a barrier.


Indeed. Not having a pricing page is an easy way to turn off prospects who want to remain silent!


"Sell me this pen"


"Okay, no problem. Welcome to our pen company! My name is Patrick- and you are? Circa? Great, nice to meet you."

Is this the first time you have been to our pen company Circa?"

:)


“Oh, you don’t have a pen anymore. Supply and demand, bro.”


Noooooooooooooo. :)


I'd rather give you the pen and sell the ink...




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: