[ApolloRising]

You may want to review your pricing model it does not make a lot of sense. Here is why: Pricing by business process with the jumps you have in your pricing probably will not work.

Have you validated your assumptions on how business operate and how many process are involved even in small businesses?

You go up from 1 to 25 users in your first small tier of 300/Mo but you only increase your processes from 5 to 10. You don't define a processes on your pricing page and your FAQ is unclear. You don't define the real value to someone using it for a real job would have in advocating why this is important to the COMPANY. Do your offer an SLA that is safe enough for any real business to trust your service? What happens if you go down for a few hours? What happens if you sell it?

-edit removed typo

[salmonlogs]

I agree the pricing model could be improved and personally think simplification would be best change.

Imagine you have a single user subscribe who works inside a big company. They implement whatever process they needed and show a colleague who wants to do that too - either run the same process to build a new one. Your goal in this situation is to rapidly expand adoption inside that company and complex licensing will really slow you down. The second they need to place another order to get more access or sign a bigger cheque you will get dragged into sign offs and approvals and procurement and all kinds of wasted time.

"Land and Expand" is the right strategy for this type of solution and you should do everything you can to not slow down adoption. Your current pricing model is definitely limiting this and the initial plan of 350/mo is quite a jump up - that WILL require levels of sign off and approvals and slow you down.

Try this exercise - create personas for users of your service (power user who wants to automate EVERYTHING, administrators who will use it because its their job, end users, managers) and work what is important to them and what variables will increase or decrease the speed and volume of adoption.

I think pricing based on number of users alone would be easier to understand and not restrict growth. If one person gets really into your product and wants to automate 100 processes DO NOT GET IN THEIR WAY! Let that champion sing your praises and tell everyone that will listen how incredible your product is, because in a few months time when they roll those processes out they will come back for more user licenses. And if you select the right features into the higher plans they may well opt for a more expensive plan to meet the needs of security, billing, management, reporting etc

[perdamgaard]

Hi This is Per, then founder of Cognifirm. Thanks for your reflections; they are extremely valuable to me (us), and I can now tell you that the pricing will be changed because of your input. Our pricing problem is this: We are moving from direct sales to online sales, so our model has to cater to both target groups. Direct obvious is the more expensive version. But it is clear to me that: The model has to be more simple The entry price will have to be much lower

This will be implemented shortly when we have had more time to finetune the model and its business consequences. Cheers, Per

[ApolloRising]

I understand the pricing model of getting in the door that's not where you are going wrong. TRY THIS EXERCISE ACTUALLY LISTEN WHEN PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO HELP YOU.

I don't think you understand, I AM your target market for this product and I'm trying to tell you the model makes no sense, you seem to be focussing on the dollar issue. I did NOT say you are priced too high, I said the pricing/usage model does not make SENSE for THIS product. You think I have the time to keep going back for some non defined "process" every time I want to automate something? Especially when the limits are this low?

I am not going to start using your product when you could vanish after I have advocated for this automation to be installed. The reason? Because I would be the one that got blamed when things suddenly break.

For data entry solutions, I could have it scripted or use any number of solutions that run in software installed on my side of the network that never will get shut off by you, your buyer, your ISP, whatever.

I hope you prove me wrong and you make a lot of money. You never did answer the other important question is what happens if your service goes down or is sold? All those people that integrated with you are going to be royally screwed unless you can offer an in house replacement platform or a guarantee in the notice that is more than reasonable. In the places I've worked this is a no go from the start if this touches anything critical in the flow of business.

I don't want to argue anymore, it never makes progress after this so take the advice or not up to you.

[salmonlogs]

I'm not the OP and have absolutely nothing to do with the company. I replied to agree with your thoughts the pricing model was wrong and shared some more thoughts of my own; apologies if this was confusing, perhaps I should have made a new reply of my own.

Hope you are doing okay and find a way to vent your frustrations better than all caps on HN comments.

[My8thAccount]

Yea I agree, this pricing model isn't very alluring. The tool could be useful, but the time you promise to save won't offset that monthly fee in real-world time. There's a sunk cost of time setting up the automation that subtracts from the time savings. Try to get rich a little slower and you might have better success.

[Kiro]

Where do you find the pricing? I'm on mobile and can't see it anywhere.

[unangst]

On mobile as well - pricing and plan tiers don’t seem to exist yet. Small SaaS companies need to cast a wide net when it comes to onboarding users - every new account should be free and easy. When people sign up, there should be five simple boilerplate examples of your AI tool so they can immediately test as a proof of concept. (Hook them at the moment when their interest has peaked and before they hop to competition.) New user can then develop their own task and run it 99 times at no charge. The path to profitability comes once they have tasks, find them useful/ depend on them, see the value of paying and then subscribing (aka your residual income machine).