ROUNDTABLES 13 upvotes 2016

Ask HN: Most successful SaaS pricing structure you've found?

13 pts
Hacker News Signal
2016 · Shared by @bookjunkie13
Ask HN: Most successful SaaS pricing structure you've found? by @bookjunkie13

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @bookjunkie13 on Hacker News:

Details like how much more revenue a product can bring by charging 99cents instead of $1 fascinate me,and I'm curious to see how that translates to the SaaS world. Thanks!

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled reflections, business mechanics, and tactical takeaways:

An open Ask HN community consultation from 2016 where @bookjunkie13 convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
2
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
3
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:

Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.

Community Discussions & Critical Reviews

Key perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (9 total discussions):

JA @jasonkester Peer Contributor

My lesson is that you need to A/B test everything, since the thing that works is never what you think will work.

For example, this terrible wall-of-text absolutely destroyed a pretty 37 Signals-esque 3-column pricing chart in A/B testing:

https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx ↗

I didn't believe it, so I tweaked it and ran the test again. Exactly the same result. So those paragraphs stay, with the same unordered order, goofy typography and everything else. Nobody touch anything! It's perfectly balanced at its local maxima.

NA @narrowrail Peer Contributor
PE @petervandijck Peer Contributor

Generally:

- 79$ (solve a business problem and its worth it. There's no difference between 29 or 39 or 79 for a business user with a credit card.)

- $399 (basically max to buy without approval if you're a manager, anything below 500$.)

- enterprise (aka call us, you'll need approval for this internally.) You could add a 799 plan here, or a 1999 plan, etc.

You want to stay away from 9$ and such unless you're selling to consumers, not businesses, in very high quantities (eg. you're netflix).

HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 13 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 9 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK: