Ask HN: Should we publish pricing?
Hello,
We are about to launch a typical simple SaaS product. It's a tool aimed for the education market. People would use this tool to create learning material. Business model is subscription based, costing about 75€ / month.
My partner and I decided to offer a free trial and not publish pricing to figure out who would be interested, but I'm really unsure if it is a good idea.
Any feedback is appreciated.
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In summary: If it's a low value item that doesn't offer much in the way of customization, it's often best to publish your prices to reduce the difficulty of sales.
As more customization comes into play and larger amounts of value are delivered, you'll want to think more and more about hiding prices so that they can be adjusted on a per-user basis.
I wrote a blog post about that a while ago... http://taprun.com/articles/should-consultants-hide-their-prices
Many people probably will think "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it". It also sounds like you might need to have time-intensive negotiations, which turns away people who want to get the product quickly.
If you have good reasons why prices are different for different people explaining that is ok, but if most people get the same plans anyways it is unnecessarily complicated.
Increasing Price Transparency: Implications of Consumer Price Posting for Consumers' Haggling Behavior and a Seller's Pricing Strategies
by Xubing Zhang and Bo Jiang
(Short answer: yes, post prices)
Thanks for the replies. While researching further, this guy suggests to not publish it until the product is in beta or in the very early stages, because we can learn a lot from the users. We are sort of here, although the UI is polished and the flow is tested, but I feel that not posting prices is not a good approach.
http://sixteenventures.com/beta-testing-pricing