How To Price Your SaaS Products Accurately | Special Edition On Mintlify's Pricing Page

Hey everybody, welcome to a special edition of Monetizing SaaS, where we're doing a teardown of one of the most important and often overlooked elements of software success. And that's the pricing page and the billing experience. If you've been in software, if you've been a founder, let's face it, a lot of startups struggle with pricing, pricing as an afterthought. I recently had a guest on the show say that most founders suck at pricing. Billing experience is all over the place. We all know this is essential stuff for achieving product market fit. For tri— for driving enterprise value once you've found it. The pricing page is arguably the most important page on your site, and how you deliver billing experience is as high leverage an opportunity as it gets. And so today we're going to dig into Mintlify, very popular dev tool company, and we're going to look at how they communicate their value through pricing. We're going to look at how well they bridge the gap between developer needs and business goals. We're going to look at their approach to billing experience purchasing experience from activation through upgrades and expansion. Joining me for this teardown are my fellow Schematic co-founders Ben, Jazz, and Gio. You're going to get very cross-functional perspective from our team. You're going to get hot takes. You're going to get candid analysis. We're going to keep it positive. We're going to look at kind of what we really like and where we think there's opportunity. Stick around and you should, you should walk away from, from this with a bunch of actionable insights. Guys, we're looking at Mintlify's pricing page here and Ben, I really want to start with you. Like, I want to kind of understand from your point of view, having bought Mintlify before, having bought competitors like Fern, I want to talk about like, what's your perception of value when kind of you look at their pricing page and how they're trying to communicate their value?

Yeah, I kind of look at it from a few different lenses and I do, yeah, I do really like Mintlify. It's a great product that we've bought before at Schematic. Um, but the way I look at things is kind of, I mean, it's hard to see from the pricing page, but like one of the most important things is like your docs these days are pretty much marketing, right? It's like kind of what developers will go right to if they're trying to evaluate if you look like you have a good product. So they kind of speak to that a little bit here, beautiful out of the box, but maybe there's other things like custom CSS JS preview deployments, things like that, that might be relevant to that. But that's kind of like these days, one of the biggest factors you think about when you're looking at a vendor like this is just, does it look like, you know, kind of at the level of the big players in terms of putting your best foot forward, inspiring confidence in your developer users? The other piece is like automation. Like to me, a lot of docs work is just toil and you want your, you want your docs processes to be as automated as possible. You really don't want to be working on docs. Like things around like integrations with other tools, like integrations with like OpenAPI, things like that, like automations around deployment are definitely things that I look for. And then kind of in that same vein, but like moving out to other parts of the organization, like just how is it going to be to work with at your company? And that's where I think really dev tools oftentimes start to push into other tiers, right? So like, you know, you have more seats or you have SSO potentially, or, you know, even like audit trails on things changing that might be built separately. So at a certain point, like you start to care because you have a team of maybe non-developers that are working on the docs product. You start to care about those types of features as well.

I think one thing that's notable to me is like if I had not really heard about Mentlify and just landed on their pricing page, it's, it's unclear to me that they're really sort of leaning into like reaffirming or restating their value proposition. And so it seems like there's like a big assumption being made that you know what Mentlify is. And maybe that's fair. Like maybe you're like, you're, if you're a developer and you're coming to Mentlify, like it's intuitive that that's true, but, but maybe not. And I think maybe the question I'm curious to get your take on is, are they leaning into some type of like differentiated value here as far as you can tell, given there are very direct competitors? Or is, is sort of the market for docs really kind of, it's fairly, it's fairly commoditized. It's the same product and they just have to articulate the pricing as clearly as they can.

Yeah, that is interesting. I think I mean, they do have a good brand that they've established over time. So I think a lot of people know what Mitlify is when they land on this page. So that's a factor, I'm sure. And you're probably right that this product category, there's a lot of table stakes. There's a lot of similar functionality between tools. So that's the second thing is people kind of know what they're shopping for when they come to this page. I think to a great extent. There's certain things that are interesting here that like, maybe like a custom domain, like they're, they're kind of sending a message there by putting that in the free tier, maybe things like this that like could be gated, you know, they, they could kind of get you with that. So maybe there's certain things like this with just the way they're packaging where they're trying to send a message around, like just making sure that, you know, like their hobby tier is something you could use. Indefinitely if you are kind of at that level, as opposed to like the type of pricing strategy where it's more like that's really a trial. That's a message they're kind of sending. But aside from that, I think you're right. Like they're kind of relying on a lot of the good work they've done over the years to establish their brand and just like kind of the knownness of the category.

You know, it seems like they're obviously trying to push people into the Pro plan. That's the most popular plan. You can try it for free. You know, for folks that are listening that are like us in terms of Stage Somatics, an early stage startup, do we fall into the Pro plan or is there another tier that you're more attracted to if you were looking at Netlify today?

We would probably be on that plan. Yeah. Like, I mean, I know I mentioned like custom JS and CSS earlier, but I was just kind of looking for examples of features that fit into that theme. Like I would be one where I would, I generally try to avoid using those types of features because again, it kind of like goes against the idea of like leaning into the automation of the tool. I don't know how interested we are in some of like the chat and AI assistant features here. Like that would be something you would discover in a trial, which is how much you like them, I think. But maybe just because of the number of editors, we would be in the Pro plan because like everyone on this call. Has some amount of work they do on our docs, right? So single editor would probably be the thing that would push us in.

Jazz, what do you see around like the business model that is sort of, sort of like that follows from their pricing model?

Yeah, I mean, I think at a high level, what do I see?

I mean, a lot of the things that you guys see, I mean, I agree they're not sort of reinforcing the value proposition that they're relatively known for, or that they probably lean into, which is probably that first thing in the hobby tier. Like, they're really— generally they compete on this is just like the best experience for docs. Um, and it's, it's, uh, you know, that is an opportunity on this page, right, to kind of really think about that a bit more and lean into it, especially if, you know, given the competitors, to Ben's point, have largely similar functionality. Right. And so that's kind of one thing I think when you think about like the business model here, right? I think the business model is really oriented around, you know, and I think largely if you see all of these docs tools, almost all of them, I think it's the— they're sort of relying on a large free base and then, and then sort of a smaller monetized enterprise base or larger business base. I would assume that their growth tier is where they derive most of their revenue. And, you know, probably a vast majority of their logos are in the hobby tier, right? It's not monetized. And I think that, I think generally, I think that's probably what you see across docs providers is you have to capture them, you want to capture them early. I think the reason for that is because there's a high barrier to exit once you're in, right? And typically when you're starting out, you know, the alternative is homegrown. It isn't necessarily something else. And so if you can provide enough value really early, you've basically got a really high retention customer over time, right? And a relatively, probably a decent lifetime value. The one thing that's sort of interesting about this is that, um, it's probably two things. One, they don't make add-ons very clear, but that clearly is a part of their business model.. And, um, and, you know, I don't, you know, it's sort of an opportunity here to kind of make them more clear, potentially allow people to buy them. Um, and then second is like, there actually isn't much of an expansion metric here. And I think this has changed since I think I looked at them last week too. And they added that dropdown for editors. I don't know if I saw that last time, but, um, but yeah, that is like the only expansion, that's sort of the only thing to drive NDR out of this type of scheme unless someone upgrades full stop to another tier. And I think there's, there's probably an opportunity to think about more value metrics or price metrics here that drive NDR. And I think that could be actually a competitive advantage, right? Because again, if you look at their competitors in the space, largely seats, editors, Or is the price metric and might be intuitive, but it also doesn't necessarily have to be the price metric for them.

Where was the expansion opportunity that you were seeing? I may be missing that.

The editors.

The editors.

So down here.

Yeah, it's on the feature list, but it's also in the top part too. It's also kind of, it's funny how they've kind of phrased this, right? Where it's like, if you're in Pro, the minimum number of editors is 5. Which is kind of like a, kind of an interesting way to kind of build this feature table. But, but yeah, I think there's an implication there, right? They're, they're sort of saying you're actually an actual business. So yeah.

Yeah. Just one comment actually on top of like, it, it did change since last week, which is crazy. I think that already speaks to what a pricing page means for companies. Like last time we looked at this a week ago, you could see that there were two add-ons that you could add. They were already built into the plan, plans you're seeing here. And there wasn't this dropdown for editor. So that's already a clear shift from maybe add-on based expansion to like seat based expansion. I think both things existed before, but there's at least an emphasis change and that happened in a week.

Definitely. I mean, the lack of an expansion metric here is, or expansion sort of lever here sort of signals that like their business model is about net new acquisition. Like it's, it's about like, can I get, can I penetrate the market faster than everyone else with a larger base? Right. And, you know, I think that's a great bet. But I think there's probably ways to kind of like introduce some ways to drive NDR that could, you know, layer onto that relatively well.

Gio, to your point there, it's like we looked at this pricing page a week ago. There is a material change here in the way they're doing the dropdown editors that I had missed when we were just looking at it a minute ago. But it does suggest, right? Like they view the pricing page as like, it is a conversion rate optimization page. This is a page to experiment with to drive growth. And they're like making changes at least on a weekly basis. If we look at kind of the last 2 weeks that we've taken a look at it.

Yeah.

And from a design perspective, just kind of taking it to the next set of considerations. Well, first of all, Mitlifi like is known for great brand, for great design. They emphasize that.

And they're only, they're less than 2 years old, which is awesome.

Yeah. They emphasize that in their own product with beautiful out of the box and the first features being about customization. And when you look at this pricing page from just a UX perspective, they avoid the main pitfall of any pricing page, which is too much complexity. The worst thing you can do with a pricing page is just make it feel overwhelming and something that you have to really analyze and read through. It should feel pretty simple what to do next. And they're doing that well. Like there's a clear funnel into the pro plan here. And you can make a quick decision right away. There's a bunch of good defaults, like with the yearly toggle and the editor's dropdown. And as you scroll down, you know, you get more detail if you want it. So I think kudos there. They've also included some logos there for social proof. So from a design UX perspective, I think they nailed it. What I like, what I think about beyond that is like, there's a clear push into the trial, probably a reverse trial because there's a freemium plan. And yeah, I, maybe my only criticisms would be, but like Jazz said, like they have add-ons, they also have usage-based features and they're sort of buried, even though they probably have a big impact on your subscription over time. Hmm.

Yeah. You know, one thing that I noticed, I agree with you, it's like super well-designed. Like most people are going to hit a pricing page and they're going to look at the tiers, right? And what they're really trying to do is self-identify, like, am I a hobbyist? Am I in pro? Am I in growth? Am I in enterprise? From there, if they're really serious, maybe they'll kind of start to scroll down and look at more detail. And I think that they've done a good job at laying out the feature table. To your point, they've done a really good job on the social proof and the validation. One thing that I don't see that, you know, I think would be maybe kind of a little bit of an opportunity is like an FAQ. I think that's always like a really good touch with pricing pages. Um, and I think you're also right, like they've done a good job of just like getting you into the product and letting you go try it. So let's look at that in a second before we, we go here, um, and look at billing experience and purchasing experience and activation. Ben, I'm curious if you can talk for a little bit from your perspective on like the add-on piece of this, like having used this product, having used its competitors, how do you start to think about the value of their add-ons? When do you start to get interested in their add-ons?

Yeah, I think it's definitely a good thing to get in the door and bring in, like, I'm a big fan of add-ons for packaging in general for tools like this, just because I think the provider, if they have the, the means to provision add-ons in a way that is operationally reasonable for them, they can get more revenue out of their customer base because jumping between tiers can often be prohibitive. So like in our case, like when we were on Mitlify, we used the password protection add-on at one point because we were kind of in stealth. That was great to just be able to do that and then, you know, remove the add-on once we were out of stealth. I think, um, like preview deployment's another one. It's like, I think that would come up a lot in a case where like we're running things by, you know, a Jazz or a Geo on this call where we're making a major change to docs, right? Like it's just nice if you're. Collaborating. That's more of one that I think similar to the seats will come up, like, as more of your team is working together. In general, like, I, I like when I see dev tools make a, a big emphasis on add-ons in their packaging. It doesn't happen a ton just because for the most part, it's a lot of work to maintain so much kind of à la carte packaging. So you, you mainly see it more for like bigger vendors basically, but, um, it's something that I really like to see.

Cool.

Um, you guys want to comment on anything else related to the pricing page before we get into trying out the product and kind of playing around with the purchasing and billing experience? Anything else?

Yeah, one thing I just wanted to point out, because, you know, we did look at this last week just, um, as a precursor to this, but it's actually interesting they removed in that hobby plan— I remember distinctly it said free for developers parentheses and everyone else. And so I think they've, they've actually removed developers entirely from the pricing page, which is kind of interesting.

Yeah, we spent 30 seconds talking about that last week. We were like, who's the ICP here? Is this developers or is this just anybody? And now they've removed it. It's, it is an interesting change. What do you, why do you think they're making that change?

I think they're probably just moving into probably two markets. One is enterprise, and I think the other is just outside of development. I think you WYSIWYG is like prominent in their hobby plan. Editors is prominent. Like you don't really have a notion of editors if you're doing just PRs on a GitHub repo. Like that's, that's kind of what their early product was. But I think they're really honestly, like if you look at the competitive set, there's one competitor in particular where it very clearly looks like they're competing with them.

When we look at the price points here, what are our visceral, visceral reactions to them having used the product and used competitors? I mean, are these. Are these price points that feel super fair, super accessible, maybe sort of on the low end as they kind of optimize for adoption, or are these starting to move into ranges that feel a little bit uncomfortable?

I think they're pricing against comps, frankly. I think it's not scary because it's what the market essentially has priced docs at. I think they're, again, the major alternative is doing it yourself. And so like, I think that's, that's kind of like what you're probably comparing it to relative to other SaaS tools. This is not cheap. And so like, you know, if they were comping against like any other tool in the startup toolkit, like this would be one of the, like the biggest, like sort of budgetary items for an early stage company. And so like, that's sort of interesting, right? Um, and maybe instructive. If you look at some of their competitors, they're clearly priced for startups, but I don't know if they're optimizing for that. I think they're optimizing once you get past hobby for filtering out everyone but actual serious businesses or funded businesses.

Do we think that they're able to sort of be on that high end when compared to other SaaS because they're eliminating so much toil or because they're eliminating so much toil plus docs are really critical in the go-to-market path for driving sales, and they're able to sort of tap into kind of—

are you, are you talking about the category or just Mailify specifically?

Mailify specifically.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, why can they be on the high end? I think that's just a choice of business model. I think if they were priced lower, their business model would be very much oriented around probably individual projects. Maybe maximizing hobbyist revenue. And I don't think— I think they're probably not— that's probably not what they're really going for.

I think it's nice to be in a position where your competition is like potentially labor. It makes it easier to charge a higher price. It'll be interesting. Like, I mean, Midlife feels pretty established, but again, we mentioned maybe they're 2 years old. So it'll be interesting if this category continues to kind of become more established, like, will that be the trade-off people are making? But will, will people be thinking like Mintlify or build it myself, or is it just going to be a pure buy decision? Like, I think that's oftentimes a maturation that developer tools go through where, you know, the, um, the, uh, foundational companies, you know, um, they, they're category creators. And so the pricing is different because the competition is just a lot of work.

All right, cool. I'm going to ask Gio to share and can you kind of start to kind of show us what it's like to purchase this product?

Yep.

Let's go, Gio! User Gio!

So this is after you've subscribed. What is the purchasing experience once you're a customer? And one thing I wanted to say is it's very geared towards that initial subscription. Beyond that, you're a little more on your own, I think, or actually more specifically, you can't do much on your own. So here on the left, they actually have in their top level navigation add-ons. So that's clearly an important strategy, or at least it used to be. Maybe that's going to change along with the pricing page iteration we saw. But two bigger, big features that they market heavily and the call to action is just opens an email. So I would expect kind of from a company like Mintlify, If you're emphasizing add-ons to this extent and it's an opportunity to expand accounts, that this would be self-service. So that's kind of out of the gate, a purchasing experience that maybe isn't totally ideal. Um, and at worst, it's actually leaving money on the table.

Why do you think they're doing that? I mean, do you guys assume that's a business decision where they like, they're maybe trying to test add-ons and see if people will pick up the phone to to talk about it, or do you view it more as like they just haven't built sort of like self-serve upgrade paths and therefore this is path of least resistance for now?

We can only speculate, but it's probably, first of all, just not that easy to do. And if it were, that would change even how they consider the question you asked. Um, I'm, if I had to guess, I don't think it's probably an experimentation thing. It's probably they haven't gotten to it. And they kind of COVID that gap manually. Perhaps it's experimentation, but my bet is it's just a little bit annoying to build and they just haven't gotten to it.

Yeah, my experience with companies 2 years old and younger is they probably haven't gotten to it, but you never know.

I think also judging by like how fast they're growing on their pricing page, like they probably don't want to pour concrete on the end.

Gio, how are they establishing like the aha moment and getting us to like activation here?

Well, I think if you're in a trial environment, you eventually get pushed to a screen like this where you are able to subscribe or manage your billing. What you have here is what I call at least like just a vanilla Stripe implementation where you have some repetition of the pricing page here. And actually, interestingly, like I think this is probably closer to the old one. Yep, it is. So you have these add-ons here. This is what it looked— this is what the marketing site pricing table looked like last week. So they're not in sync yet, but normal. Anyway, I think you get to a Stripe checkout. Like on the question of aha moment, I mean, there's probably a lot of aha moments with this product, getting your docs page public and it's working and it looks good. But I think in terms of when you're ready to buy, you get a Stripe experience, a pretty classic one. And like we talked about, that, that works, I think, for a lot of companies early stage, but you already see some limitations of that. There's no self-service add-ons. You don't see the usage that actually impacts your billing. Like there's chat responses, there's AI, different usage there. I think we saw on the updated page, there's like limits on pages. Yeah, we see that there and all of that and editors, of course, all of that impacts your subscription and you can't see that similarly on the members page. Like you can. There's not any reference to how these decisions will impact your subscription, but they ostensibly will. So I think it's a pretty standard billing page, but you could kind of see some of the limitations of just a vanilla Stripe implementation.

Yeah, it's, I mean, there's also, I mean, what's also interesting and about this is this does not mirror their pricing page. And, and given the controls are so limited, I think part of maybe the lesson here, like one thing to infer from this is like, I'm not, I'm not sure they really care about post-sale that much. I think they care about initial conversion, like a lot, but post-sale, they probably are like, all right, well, they're in, we'll figure it out later. Um, and we can sacrifice some upsell and natural sort of like upsell from that user base for now. Really the acquisition point is all that matters. And I think the reason why that probably makes sense for this business is kind of what we were getting at earlier, which is like, if I can get them in, their barrier to exit's so high, and then I can just, I can play around for a while.

The question I find myself asking is, were they to drop initial entry price a little bit and make it even more accessible and then focus a bit more on expansion, would they actually generate more revenue? And would that, would that revenue come more quickly?

Good question. I'm not sure. It's, it's probably something to experiment with for sure. But given how much they give away in the, in the entry tier, I don't know if that price tier actually scares anybody away.

Well, one thing I would add on is I think there's, it's, it's clear, like you said, Jazz, that they're optimizing for getting in, but they also have made a decision to put add-ons in their top level navigation. Very, very obvious, like, thing you can't miss. So that's interesting, right? That's a monetization decision also.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Also, I think aside from the, like, the point I was making earlier about labor substitution, I think also people are just a little less price sensitive here because it's just not something where your biggest concern is price. Like, you'd rather pay a little bit more for something that's going to be better because of how stuck with it you are and how prominent it is. I think, right? It's kind of like there's certain things where you only just want the cheapest, and there's other things where quality is like more highly prioritized or perceived quality.

So if it were like too cheap, you'd be like, like, is this, is this solution real? Like that might be like part of the tactic here, right?

Possibly also because it's user-facing and as we know, docs are also a selling tool. Like an extension of your marketing site and an extension of your product.

There's this really important thing, Ben, you're typing.

Gio, walk us through like what you've noticed and observed around just like the customer portal experience. And is it—

I think it's, it lives in, I would put customer portal type functionality on this page, a billing page, a member page, because it impacts again your subscription and access. And then the top level add-on page. These are all versions or instances of customer portal-like functionality. And maybe, I don't know if I have a thought beyond what I've said, but it's an interesting mix of like really high emphasis on add-ons, but no self-service. And then you've got your vanilla Stripe integration that I think works, but has limitations like we talked about.

What opportunities do we see for Netlify?

If they want to lean on an expansion metric like editors or on add-ons like they seem to want to on their pricing page, and maybe they're changing strategy there.

I—

the investment into self-service I think is worthwhile if they actually want to experiment with expansion. If they're not at a place where they want to do that and they're, they're like what Jazz said, just, just get people in and maybe we manually expand them or do things that don't scale to expand them, then I think what they have works. But if they're ready to kind of kick it into gear and let their customers expand themselves and, you know, actually make their experimentation on their pricing page reflected in their product and enforced in their product, I think there's a lot of opportunities like we talked about, just enabling self-service and showing usage too, because there's a bunch of usage that impacts your subscription and is not on, is not visible.

I think like there's definitely opportunities on the pricing page. There's definitely opportunities top of funnel to be more clear about add-ons, about value proposition, about addressing people's questions. And I think that's more, even more important as they appear to be moving towards a different persona. But I think a lot of the energy frankly is going towards presale and that's that's evident in kind of like what we're sort of seeing between these two states. So I think like the, you know, one of the bigger opportunities in my view is just optimizing post-sale and optimizing to Gio's point, the ability for the user to serve themselves, the ability for them to understand usage and the impact of their usage on pricing and, and kind of remove friction here, right? Because it's just, it's very, it seems very easy to buy and try initially. Seems very hard post-sale to do those things.

Okay, cool. Well, I think, I think we've covered it here. We've done a teardown of Netlify's pricing. We've done a teardown of Netlify's billing experience. I think they do a great job. A couple opportunities around self-serve and how they're kind of marketing add-ons, how they're describing their value prop. Hope you guys found this useful. And next week we'll bring you a teardown from another developer tool. Thanks for being with us.