| Hey Dictum - we're free for non-basic usage, basic usage, and everything in-between. I explained a lot of why this is the case in the blog post link below (when we went all in for free), but it really comes down to the following: PHILOSOPHICAL
1. In software (and the subscription economy) we're moving away from function based pricing to outcome based pricing. Putting this simply in the context of analytics/reporting means that if I just take your data and put it into a bunch of graphs, it's helpful, but not valuable, even if they are the right graphs (and most of the time they aren't the right graphs, at least in most BI/analytics products). 2. Based on this, we believe in outcome based pricing. We make money by selling products like Retain, Price Intelligently, etc. that all have a specific number we can point to (in your free ProfitWell account :)) that we helped move in the right direction. For some of these products we then only perfectly charge based on our performance. Others where we can't measure this precisely, we still price on a value metric axis. ANALYTICAL
1. Metrics/analytics are a terrible business from a willingness to pay and unit economics perspective. People don't really appreciate how much work goes into 100% accuracy (that's our thing compared to our competitors fwiw). It took years to be perfect and even now we're still finding edge cases of edge cases. Multiply this by the number of billing systems and it takes a lot of work to support this free product. Here's the thing though - back to that lack of appreciation - when measuring the willingness to pay for analytics/metrics, people just aren't willing to pay that much. We measured this well ahead of going all in on free and found that our unit economics, especially in a market that's weak in number of logos (subscription market is much smaller than people think). As a result, most BI/analytics companies go up market. We're upmarket and do have an enterprise plan for all the fun enterprise fixings people need, but we don't want to waste massive amounts of CAC fighting for $50/month or even $150/month. Creating a phenomenal user experience (we're not there yet) is so much valuable. Plus, we're able to show our customers they have a problem that we can then sell an add-on for. Long story short, this business and space requires a scalpel, not a sledgehammer for growth. Hope that's helpful. Always up for answering questions. Here's the blog post we wrote up with some of the data, too: https://www.profitwell.com/blog/why-we-released-a-better-pro... |
"Plus, we're able to show our customers they have a problem that we can then sell an add-on for." - I really like that part.