The Saddest SaaS Pricing Pages of the Year

http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/192297/The-Saddest-SaaS-Pricing-Pages-of-the-Year

by pccampbell • 13 years ago

171 81 13 years ago

blog.priceintelligently.com

fotbr2• 13 years ago

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.

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

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-...

tieTYT2• 13 years ago

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.

agibsonccc• 13 years ago

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.

toomuchtodo3• 13 years ago

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

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

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

reinhardt• 13 years ago

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

notahacker3• 13 years ago

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.

zaidf3• 13 years ago

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.

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

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.

thrush• 13 years ago

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.

notahacker3• 13 years ago

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.

pyre2• 13 years ago

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.

jasonkester• 13 years ago

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.

nostromo• 13 years ago

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.

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

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.

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

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.

danielweber• 13 years ago

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.)

Spooky23• 13 years ago

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.

AJ007• 13 years ago

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.

nicholas73• 13 years ago

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.

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

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.

run4_too• 13 years ago

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.

tanzam75• 13 years ago

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...

landryraccoon• 13 years ago

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).

socalnate1• 13 years ago

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

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

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.

mbesto• 13 years ago

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.

PeterWhittaker• 13 years ago

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.

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

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.

jaboyer42• 13 years ago

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

tdawson• 13 years ago

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

leowidrich• 13 years ago

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.

brianlovin• 13 years ago

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 :)

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

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.

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

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.

justinsteele2• 13 years ago

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

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

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.

justinsteele2• 13 years ago

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.

circa• 13 years ago

"Sell me this pen"

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

"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?"

peterox• 13 years ago

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

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

Noooooooooooooo. :)

krapp• 13 years ago

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

vylan• 13 years ago

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

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

No worries. Love the product!

jameszhang• 13 years ago

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

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

Nice! We're big fans. :)

Tell Brendan to stop grinding his coffee so loudly.

- Patrick

brianbreslin• 13 years ago

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.

pccampbell17• 13 years ago

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

smtddr• 13 years ago

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.

abruzzi2• 13 years ago

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.

elwell2• 13 years ago

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

mik3y• 13 years ago

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..

elwell2• 13 years ago

Good points; thanks.

dandare• 13 years ago

@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...

The Saddest SaaS Pricing Pages of the Year

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