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by markkoberlein 5899 days ago
"The real number could be arrived by studying competition, market size, target audience, perceived value of your service and many other factors."

It would be helpful if someone did a study on pricing plans of popular web apps and could show how the pricing models affected the overall success of the apps in their own markets.

3 comments

We've started to collect "pricing urls" on Cloudomatic.com I've been thinking of doing a few things with all of these pages. One is: how many plans are there on average? How many have a free trial and average length? Average price for a saas app.

Another is talking to a good chunk of startups and doing a: this is how you determine pricing white paper.

What would be useful to you guys?

I'd say yes, but not because I know it will be useful, but because I think it would be interesting to compare people's marketing and customer segmenting strategies.
Since I am in deciding stage of pricing for my application, I studied the market and researched how pricing plans evolved for a SaaS startup. Shall make a blog post soon.
There's so much more to it than price.

For example, if a product has a good price, but poor targeting (saying "this is for you!" to a niche or type of person/business), or the net they cast for traffic is too broad (e.g. people from Digg), they are not going to have success selling plans, period.

In other words: There's no price that is good enough to sell a boob job to a man, for himself.

I agree that there is a lot more to it than price but it would be helpful when doing market research.
No, it really wouldn't.

Take, for example, the idea that Honeywell was trying to sell mainframes to house wives. They did -- everybody did in the 70s, because they were dumb as a box of rocks.

Take the same mainframe and sell it to a bank.

The data for the first attempted sale (housewives) would make you think "Gee, that price is too high! They're not selling."

For the second, the price could be the same, but the audience would actually buy it.

If you don't qualify whether a business is doing a shit job of targeting, your market pricing data is absolutely worthless.