OpenStatus
We began the new year with two goals: to increase profitability and attract more paid users. One way to accomplish this was to overhaul our pricing.
However, this was a challenging task due to the complexity of pricing.
We have introduced two new plans and renamed our current plan as follows:
- Starter: 29e (previously known as the Pro plan)
- Growth: 79e
- Pro: 149e
We went through multiple iterations before selecting them.
Per Seat pricing sucks 🗑️
When I initially shared the draft of our new pricing, we had a per seat limitation. It was shamelessly copied from our competitors, who all use per seat pricing, and many other SaaS businesses.
We believed it was the simplest way for our users to upgrade to a higher tier. However, the first reaction from @tibotiber, @notrab, and @chronark_ was to eliminate the per seat pricing.
I agreed with them, as per seat pricing doesn't add any value in our case.
I remembered that I was frustrated when I was using a product with per seat pricing. And what I did was to set up a team account with a catch-all email and share the credentials with the team.
We dropped the per seat pricing.
Don’t be cheap 🤑
By the end of December, I have been asked for a €9 plan. Initially, when we revised our pricing plan, we added this as our first option.
We believed that offering a plan at such a low price would attract more customers, as €9 is affordable for most companies and it would show their support for us.
After couple of days, we realized that it was a mistake. We should not be cheap. We are a fully bootstrapped, we can't compete on cheaper pricing, but we can compete with a better product, though.
If we have a cheap plan, our customers will be biased towards using our product. We won't feel it's worth the same thing as our competitor, even if our product offers a better alternative to them.
Avoiding underpricing was the most challenging for us.
How we priced our plans 📈
We have wanted to only to price our product based on the value it provides to our users.
Thus we are only charging for:
- The number of monitors
- The number of alerts
Why only these two metrics?
- For the monitors, we have a higher request frequency and therefore more data to process on Tinybird. We also have a longer data retention period.
- For the alerts we are paying our SMS provider.
We also wanted to keep it simple and avoid a pay-as-you-go plan. We don't want some of our users to end up with a huge bill at the end of the month. 💸
Why did we keep the free plan? 🤔
Some bootstrappers (like marc) will tell you to remove the free plan. It's a waste of time.
We wanted to keep it within reasonable limitations. The number of monitors should be enough for a small side project. For us, it's a way to attract more users to use our product.
And if more users are using our hosted status page, we will have more SEO backlinks, and it's a win for us.
Conclusion 🎉
It's hard to price your product. But our pricing is not static. If it's not working, we will change it.
Want to support us? Sign-up and pick the plan that rights for you.