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(Cross-posted from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012831) I don't know anything about Postman, but this is an interesting case study on price increases.
No one likes price increases, but they happen. So long as you have a strong ROI use case, you can navigate those discussions with your customers. E.g., "You were getting a 50x return, but listen, we're running a business over here, and a 45x return is still pretty darn good." The challenge in Postman's case appears to be that they ALSO reduced the bundle components. So you compound the perception from "paying more" to "paying more but getting less". That's worse optics. What I'd offer you think about is this may be a perfectly rational and even optimal customer solution. It's unifying two different pricing actions: price increase and product bundling. The logic being that many customers weren't using all the users, API calls, documentation views, custom domains, and integrations that were previously included in, say, the Pro bundle. So as opposed to increasing price by—I'm making up numbers here—12% and leaving bundle elements the same, they increased price by 10% and cut features by 2%. The end result is exactly the same, but is actually better for most customers because they will get the same level of features they needed and not have to pay that additional 2% for features they weren't using anyway. |
Albeit, this means that you now don't have pretty bundles, and are selling features à la carte, which can be hard to manage. OR you make all those customers upgrade to Enterprise, which they'll be pissed about, but still falls into the logical "paying more for more" optics.