Ask HN: My App's Pricing plans.
Hey HN, I'm launching an SaaS app soon(description is below) and would like your opinion on the way we should go in terms of pricing.
Quick description of app: Questionify manages your site's FAQ page by letting your customers ask questions(no login required). Questions are placed into categories(which of course you can manage) and are displayed according to the view count. Customers can subscribe to questions(there's a "I had that question too!" button which encourages this).
Do you think we should do Freemium? How do you think pricing plans would be ok, based on number of users/questions?
Feedback would be greatly appreciated.
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The problem that I have with your question is that I'm having trouble what you mean when you suggest you base pricing on "number of users/questions". What does that mean? To me, as a webmaster, I start thinking, "Wait - do I have to know how many users are hitting my website or do they mean how many users can manage/edit the questions/answers?" It's a bit confusing.
I'm going to assume that you are thinking along the lines of "How many users the company appoints to edit/manage the entries." Okay - if that's the case then what happens if a big company (like MSFT) decides to try you out on 10 pages that have 1-2 editors? You might get tens of thousands of hits but still get the same revenue that a one-person site with 1k uniques a month gets you. Can you scale that?
I don't know - it's a tough slope but I think you have to put something in there to prevent DOS to other clients because you are fulfilling one big client's requests ten-fold over the others.
In my completely unprofesional opinion, and with absolutly no experiance in this area, I would advise you to skip freemium. I am guessing that if you go with freemium you are going to get a bunch of people using it who are just adding an FAQ to their freepages 'website' and are unable to or never plan to upgrade to a paid version. The money will probably be in going after big buisnesses, colleges, NPOs, etc. who want to find out what their customer's questions really are. (Or possibly you could have a freemium version that had advertisements in it, and have the ads pay for everything.)
I also recall seeing several people complain about how it is often those who are not paying for the service that cause the most customer service difficulties.
On freemium: I'd really follow the advice of "It is a numbers game, so bust out your Excel spreadsheet" (from http://gigaom.com/2010/03/26/case-studies-in-freemium-pandora-dropbox-evernote-automattic-and-mailchimp/).
I would really try to understand how much a freemium user cost in your case, and how many (and which) premium users you would need to cover the free ones.
There was an interesting article on HN recently: http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/03/07/choosing-a-price-for-your-webapp-or-startup-using-multivariate-testing/
Might be of relevance to you.
Freemium may work if the free package has your logo/name and and a link back to your site on the users FAQ page.
If you get any reasonable volume on your free product, this could work well for your SEO & brand.