9 Thoughts On What Makes a GREAT Pricing Page

Hey everybody. I wanted to give you nine thoughts on what makes for a better pricing page. And boy, there is a lot of discussion on SaaS on the Internet around pricing and absolutely for sure, optimizing pricing is one of the biggest and best ways to give yourself a boost at the margin. At the margin when you've already closed that customer, when you've done that hard work, boy, it's frustrating to leave some money on the table because you got pricing wrong or got folks into the wrong addition or undercharged or mischarged. And so it is profoundly important. But here's the thing about pricing. You will figure it out over time. You will figure it out over time, you will get good at it at scale and it won't really matter that much the mistakes you make in the early days. Yes, it's frustrating if you undercharged your first 50, 100, 200 customers, but when you have 10,000, does it really matter? The early customers are mostly about learning about learning how to deliver value, how to. And part of delivering value is pricing correctly, pricing commensurate with that value. Having said that, it is stressful. It is stressful to get pricing right. And I think there's a lot of confusing advice on the Internet in many ways because folks are at so many different stages and folks that have big brands and folks that are later stage can do different things, things that actually create more friction in particular than folks that are early stage that just gotta get folks through the funnel and put it on the board. And with that, let me give you nine thoughts and learnings for what makes a good pricing page. And the first one, which I think most folks intuitively know but can get confusing this day when you look at big SaaS companies, is that the stronger the brand, the more complex the pricing can be. If we look at Datadog's pricing, Datadog's literally one of the most successful cloud SaaS IPOs of the last year or two. It's crazy the growth that Datadog has, but they have such a complex pricing page. And why? Well, they have 13 products. Datadog has grown from a single APM product to an incredibly rich suite at a billion in error with 13 different products. That's not you, that's not you. And you don't have the brand that Datadog does, right? Similarly, take a look at Twilio's pricing page. You'll see, you'll see dozens of products and five or six core products in each category. Twilio's pricing page is quite complicated, but they also have a lot of pricing at this point. So be thoughtful about that. Don't emulate too much complexity. And remember, top brands can afford complexity. Top brands can afford complexity. Go to Salesforce's pricing page. Just even just go to Salesforce's individual clouds. Each of the individual clouds have so many different products. But when you're going to Salesforce, when you're going to Twilio, when you're going to Datadog, those and those are three great market leaders, right? Salesforce, Twilio and Datadog in their own spaces you already sort of know you might want to buy. And part of this pricing page is discovering which products you'll buy which of the choices. But the earlier you are, the less it's about which you will buy then if that than if it will buy. So complexity is really your enemy when you're tiny, but it can become an ally when your brand is stronger. 2. This is really maybe the single most important piece of advice is remember buyers are veterans. We have all bought over 100 SaaS applications today. Almost every customer has prospect you'll talk to and that means they've evaluated maybe three or 400. Okay. There's nothing new under the sun, especially on pricing. So the closer you make your pricing schema to a roughly similar product, the easier it's going to be. Look, if I pay this much for Notion or this much for Calendly or this much for Salesforce or netsuite and you're roughly provide as much value as them, you're roughly in that sort of comparable. It's very comforting to see a price page that's very similar. The most extreme example is you'll meet literally dozens or a hundred different apps that have copied stripes pricing. It's API pricing. On the metering side. It took us a while to figure out how to do metered pricing and sometimes that works when you're a part of cogs like billing or minutes like Twilio, sometimes it's it's bad for a typical B2B application. But so many folks just copy the way stripe does it because everybody uses stripe it makes you comfortable. So so figure out who your closest comp is. And the basic way your pricing page should work is copy them. It's okay innovate on the product. You do not need to innovate on pricing folks. You need to disinnovate on pric comfortable pricing make pricing people don't know like why does software cost anything? Why is Salesforce Ultimate Edition $300 a month and I get Notion on five bucks a month and both, frankly, are equally as valuable at our little organization. At Saster, we could debate that. It could be rich, rich, rich product workflows. It could be value, it could be dollars invested. But who knows? But I need context. So if you're like notion, I'm probably cool paying you five bucks a month. And the more you're like salesforce, the more maybe there's a chance I could pay you 50, 100, even $300 a month for their ultimate edition. So anchor in a comp and don't make the mistake of thinking you don't have a comparable. Maybe you are one of those apps that really is doing something disruptive and new, but it doesn't mean that someone isn't doing something similar in a different space. Right? Maybe. At least the way people deploy you is like stripe. Even if you're not a stripe competitor, then copy their pricing, copy notions, pricing calendar, et cetera. Don't innovate on pricing. Take advantage of the fact that we are veterans. Okay, point three. And I know you sort of intuitively know this, but additions are helpful. Okay, and why, if you go to a lot of vendors, almost any vendor, pick a notion again. Calendly, Salesforce, most vendors are going to have small, medium and large editions. They may call themselves, you know, small or free or one seat or team or enterprise. But why do they have these multiple editions? It can seem like it's a ripoff at first. It can seem like, well, why does business plus for box costs $25 a month when business is 15? It can seem like a game and sometimes it can be if you don't help your prospects and customers find the right addition. But the truth is, again, we're buying veterans and we know that different types of companies need different features and functionality. So just tell me if I need business plus at box for $25 a month, then just, just tell me. Help me get there so that I know I don't need starter at $5. Or do I need enterprise for calendly to deploy to hundreds of folks? Just tell me. And additions help done right, Reduce complexity when you have multiple size buyers and multiple buyer Personas. But try to get it down to three or four and try to figure out a way to make that pricing page so intuitive that it's not that it's so much that I have four choices, I have one or two choices and I know who I am. Big co goes here, medium goes here, small goes here. And it'll actually simplify things because you can take people on the right buying journey and make their lives simpler. So again, if you sell to customers small, medium and large, and many of us do, many of us build these apps that customers of all different sizes can use, then have additions small, medium and large, but do them right so that they help the customer figure out which one to buy. Okay, next point, Contact me and non transparent pricing. Should you do it, should you have non transparent pricing and should you have contact me? We just did another deep dive on Sas or you can take a look at it. And basically the learning, which actually I wasn't sure of these days, is that everyone with an enterprise edition has Contact Me pricing, but almost everyone that isn't enterprise has transparent pricing on smaller editions. So what do I mean if you have products for small, medium, large or additions for small, medium, large and very large customers, almost everybody publishes clear pricing for the SMB editions. $5 a month, $10 a month, 5 cents a minute, whatever it is. And then an enterprise is always Contact Me. And if you think about this one intuitively, that's a great way to do it because what you want again is your pricing page. Not to add friction, at least not until you're very big and can afford friction. But you want it to reduce friction. So on the smaller editions, for SMBs, for self service, for deployment, you want transparent pricing. If for no other reason, that boy, it reduces friction. It lets a buyer buy right then and it lets them do discovery on their own. They know how much it buys. But as the product gets more complicated, as there's integrations, importantly as there's work to deploy, Contact me no longer becomes like a rip off, like just tell me what the pricing is guys. It's not a ripoff. It is more part of a conversation of discovery for larger customers to figure out if they want to buy. And large customers are never going to do an enterprise deployment or rarely. They'll rarely do an enterprise deployment, clicking and put it on their credit card. There is a discovery, there are budgets, it's complicated and it would be great to have a sense of what it costs. And I like what Shopify plus does it for Shopify plus, which is Shopify's enterprise edition, it tells you the pricing is $2,000 and up and why it doesn't give you an exact quote like it does for the smaller editions for regular Shopify. For small businesses, you know exactly what you're going to pay. Shopify plus for enterprise, you just get a ballpark. But you get a ballpark before you go into Contact Me. Maybe that's the Best of all worlds. But remember, transparent pricing seems to be the way to go. And you know, it's the way to go for smaller businesses. But almost everyone in the enterprise has contact me and maybe just be thoughtful, be thoughtful about the line. Think about when does it help? What addition do you have where customers want to talk sales. Not just to get a quote, not to get ripped off or have pricing drama, but to get help. And remember, in the enterprise, really, hopefully everywhere, a salesperson helps a buyer. They create the meetings, they create the demos, they create the collateral. In enterprises, there's always multiple stakeholders in any deal. And your sales rep, if you're a buyer, does the work for you. They help you socialize the deal to the other 15 or 20 people in the company. So that's when contact me is okay. And maybe before that it isn't. So just remember that not only are like additions good if you do them right because they help the buyer decide which, which path to go down. Non transparent contact me works. Everybody seems to do it, but. But try to isolate it for your most complex versions of your product. Okay, next point. And this is like, this is where there's so much, I think almost bad advice on the Internet. But we touched about it at this beginning. It is okay. It is okay, folks, to leave money on the table in the early days. Remember, I know you want to get from 0 to 1 million ARR that first year and then from 1 to 5 the next and 5 to 15. And I want you to do that. It can be done. The best folks do it. But remember, in many ways, we're always learning in the early days. And it's much better to close a customer at an unoptimized price than never to get that customer at all. To never learn. That's what we're trying to do. Those first hundred thousand customers, they're such a small part of our ultimate journey, but they're the ones we tend to learn the most of. So make sure your pricing does not discourage buyers. Does not discourage buyers. And the key way to do it is it's okay to leave a little money on the table and it kind of ties to the next point, which is anchoring high. Okay, when should you anchor high in price? Now, what is anchoring high? Anchoring high. You've got to do it right. Anchoring high is actually where you use a pricing page to tell prospects and customers you are actually the most enterprise, the most sophisticated vendor. Customers know that there's a reason the most expensive version of Salesforce is now $300 a month per seat. It's because frankly, it's a very rich application and Salesforce should cost more than pipedrive and probably should cost more than HubSpot, CRM and probably almost any other vendor because it is the most powerful and certainly rich and sophisticated and integrated application out. So look, if Your competition is 10 or $20 a month and you go out and you say we're 40 and we're enterprise, that actually could be the least frictionful way to do pricing. If it's true. If you want to be the enterprise vendor, and again, there are basically three ways to price compared to the competition. You could anchor low. We're cheaper. That's not what most of us want to do. But in some commodity spaces it can make sense. Certainly there are areas that have become commodified like video and messaging, a lot of messag messaging or being cheaper than Twilio. Maybe it does get you those customers in the beginning. But anchoring low isn't what most of us do. There's anchoring same ish. Right. Which we're all kind of like priced similar to both the competition and similar apps. That's the best strategy for most of us. And then anchoring high if you're truly enterprise. And again, don't be scared to anchor high if you want to be the most enterprise vendor in the space. It's a great way to have that discussion. Talk to the age and why is your product $50 a month when everyone else is 20? Well, we're the only one that is fully integrated with this. That is SOC 2, that, that is HIPAA compliant, that can do this, can do that, that integrates with all of your workflows, that automates this. That makes sense. Maybe you're even the cheapest all in by being the most expensive. But do anchor high if you can deliver. Okay, next point on pricing, which, which I think people get lost in point seven with the biggest customers. Don't forget it's total deal size that matters. Okay, yeah, per seat pricing, per unit, per minute matters, but enterprises really need to know what it's going to cost, what it's going to cost me for 1,000 agents, 2,000 agents, 10,000 agents, 5,000 employees in HR, whatever it is, and help folks figure that out, that is more important than pricing. It's interesting if you look at Atlassian's pricing page and Atlassian has small, medium and very large customers, it helps you calculate the cost for all of your users at a big enterprise. It does it. All of it. How many users on your team and help you calculate that full price. It's not null. But what I like about the way Atlassian does is it's not trying to just give you a quote per seats, it's trying to tell you what it's going to cost to cover your whole team. And that's the way it works. Folks in big companies have budgets and they slice portions of their budgets for different apps. And I need to know what is this going to cost me? 250,000 a year, $500,000 a year, 50,000 a year? 100,000. And that's going to be much more important to me in many cases than the exact per seat or other pricing. I know you know that, but again, that's ultimately the thing that most most wants to matter. Point 8. And this is really the founders and the CEO's job. Remember, no one wants to get ripped off. This is where I see so many folks, so many sales teams make mistakes these days. We're all, again, as we talked about earlier, we are all SaaS buying veterans and we're not stupid. And we have bought in many cases, three or four different versions or different vendors for project management and product management, document management and collaboration. I mean, gosh, if many of the apps that we love today slack, notion, calendly, whatever, Asana ClickUp, we already used a different version of it four or five years ago of the same space. So we're willing to pay up. We all know sort of what these apps cost, but no one wants to be ripped off. And in new sales teams and young sales teams, you just have to be careful that we don't cross the line. Make sure pricing is fair. Make sure when you finish your pricing page and you've done everything we've talked about and you have the additions and you have, you decide where you want to anchor and you make it clear and you do everything that matters. Make sure you know it's fair. And the sales team may push you and that's their job. They may push you to the edge of fair, but make sure it's fair. Another point, pricing protection. Okay, sales would love to, in many cases or others would love to increase pricing each year. And that's a nuanced topic. Certainly there are ways to increase pricing, but I think your early customers should get pricing protection. They've made a huge investment on you. And if you do pricing protection, if you say you get this price for two years or three years or five years, you don't feel like you get ripped off. That feeling that boy, maybe I Got a good deal from this new vendor, but next year the price is going to go through the roof. That doesn't feel right. That doesn't feel fair. And it adds a lot of friction. 3. Make upsell organic. Boy, there's a SaaS company I'm working at that just crossed 10 million. But there's no clear place on their website to buy more, to add more. And they went back and talked to their customers and it was the biggest source of friction. Yes, this was an app where most folks wanted to go through sales initially for some guidance on how to deploy it, but then when they wanted to buy more of it, they just wanted to click a button and they couldn't make up sales. Easy. Don't force folks in particular to go through sales for upsell if they don't really have to. Or at least think about it. At least think about if there's a list price way, a basic way to just organically, transparently upsell and you will upsell more, which is the magic in SaaS, as we've learned, right? Which is high NRR. And you're not going to get the highest NRR if you make it hard to upgrade. Okay, and last point on not getting ripped off. Make sure that support is as close to real time as practical. This is what people want. They want their concerns addressed. And I know people, I say this a lot and people think it's nutty. But look, if you call the local restaurant or the local someone, someone picks up the phone. Why can't I get that from my SaaS app that you're asking me to pay 1,000, 2,000, 10,000, $50,000 a month? Why can't I get as close to real time support? Why doesn't chat work? Why is there no one on the phone? Why do I not know? Why do I not know who my person is? Who my named person is? That's why a great sales rep is so helpful, because they're. They're your person. Right? Who's my person? Once the deal closed. So just make sure especially. Well, hopefully for always, but especially with your early customers, they feel like all their concerns addressed and they can always reach someone in as close to real time as possible. That just takes friction out. It makes people feel like they're not going to be ripped off. Think about this. Make sure people aren't ripped off. The last point, 0.9 on pricing. And this is kind of where we started this discussion. Remember, what really matters, especially to founders, is your customer lifetime value. Okay? And that's what Matters how you're going to grow this account over decades. I'm amazed that at Adobe Sign, last company that I founded before Saster, boy, I mean, gosh, we started closing. We founded the company in 2006 and started closing Material customers in 2008. A lot of those customers are still there with us at Adobe. I can see them in the case studies and on the website. I see customers that are in their 11th, 12th, 13th year. It's crazy. They will stay forever. And more importantly, as you know, especially if you have an app that's even just a little bit enterprise, their deal sizes will grow. You know, there are multiple customers there that are million dollar customers or close to it, that started off as 10 or 20k customers a year. So that 20k deal to start became a million dollar deal a couple years in and then recurred for another 10. That $20,000 customer that we had back then could be worth 10, $12 million. Say. I think there's multiple examples of that at Adobe Sign. And so that's your job. Not that there's something perfectly actionable here, but you know this. As founders close every customer relentlessly, remove friction, don't rip people off. It's okay to air the side on the side of undercharging over overcharging and make upgrades effortless, effortless so that they can do this. It's customer lifetime value that matters. And your best customers will last a decade. So worry a little less, less about every nickel on day one and a little bit more about just how to get them in your app, on your app, onboarded, using you and happy. And that's the real magic in a pricing page. Taking Friction out and increasing the onboarding rate and increasing the odds that they stay for a decade and ultimately pay 20, 30, maybe 100 times more what they pay for you those first couple of months.