I'm developing a web service and have the idea of implementing charging for the service using a Cost Per Call (CPC) method, having the customer keep a monetary balance with the service to continue using it. Does this seem like a reasonable way of charging customers, or would they be more happy with a tiered (based on usage) monthly subscription model? Pluses and minuses of either pricing model would be greatly appreciated.
I think most customers would prefer to know that this is going to cost me $99/month till I hit a certain level of XYZ and that you will contact them when they approach that level to move up to the next plan.<p>Plus for your benefit I think you'll make more money off the tiered plan (depending on the service you are offering).<p>While everyone wants highly engaged customers who are getting maximum value out of your service I think you could have months where a user just doesn't log in to view their data that often, it's still there, still providing value but they might only login and review once per month.<p>Are you going to charge them $99/view?<p>On the flip side you might have users who login 4 times per day so they are both getting value but costs would be very low vs. very high.<p>I think tiered plans work better.<p>Take this feedback with a grain of salt as it may depend on your service/offering.<p>But for most SaaS I'd rather see as tiered as both a user and the owner of the SaaS app.
I'll be looking at pricing too soon for my business, which has to do with processing PDFs.
I'm thinking N cents per PDF, or N dollars per month unlimited.<p>I've set an HNWatcher [1] for anything pricing related (which is how I found this post), so I'm really just trying to learn as much as I can right now.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.hnwatcher.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hnwatcher.com/</a>
CPC doesn't model your customers cost / revenues well. They'll want to tie the software cost to a person or business cost or revenue, such as $50 per seat, or $1 per customer they have.