I have a product that I plan to release soonishly. I am planning on doing a free-for-public, pay-for-private pricing model. For the latter, the choice is essentially between Github's model and Bitbucket's model. Github allows unlimited private collaborators but charges by the project. Bitbucket allows unlimited private projects but charges by the collaborator.<p>My question is: have any of you decided between these pricing models for your product? If so, how did you decide? Also, any related resources would be appreciated. Thanks!
Disclaimer: I have no slightest idea about economics. And I'm not sure the following is a good idea. So, don't listen to me.<p>As I get it, you probably want to let users start for free when their requirements are small, and start changing as they grow. I suppose everyone has different needs, though — some value ability to spawn a dozens of tiny private repos, but some want just one for a relatively large team.<p>Then — just a wild idea — maybe assign some value for resources and services you provide and give a quota of what's free? Say, maybe, the formula could be repository count multiplied by collaborator count, so mediocre usage will stay under the threshold, raising either repo count or collaborator number alone (possibly, until the number is sufficiently large) still wouldn't be enough to leave the free tier, but raising both would nearly instantly require paying for your services. Something along those lines.<p>This probably could be confusing to customers (although some flexible cloud providers seem to deal with it with those fancy price calculators page with resource sliders), but maybe you'll think something. Or not.<p>And it certainly depends whenever your customers actually want such flexibility and there's enough diversity of use cases among them. Maybe they don't care and everything fits into something simpler. Then, for me, I think it's BitBucket's model — even though most of my repos are public (and are on GitHub), I have two private ones (on BitBucket), with no collaborators.
I prefer BitBuckets because I don't want pricing to become an issue in how I split up my projects. They also have free private repos if you have 5 collaborators or fewer.
Bitbucket has better pricing for closed-source projects, Github has better pricing for open-source projects.<p>It really depends on the structure of your market and your competitors. There's not enough information in your post to say anything more helpful than that.
Pricing is a big interest of mine (30,000 words into writing a guide on it). Understanding your ideal pricing depends upon understanding your customers and your value proposition.<p>We need more information before we can tell you what to charge and how to charge it.
By the user is more typical for enterprise software (in general, not limited to SaaS) and probably more related to cost in comparison with by the project.