Pricing is hard. We need your help.

Because your customers are going to be more technical I would do the utility pricing. Pay per unit of usage.<p>If you need help with pricing, email me. Our company does algorithmic pricing via a REST API, I'll give Keen access for free.<p>To address your listed cons to utility style pricing:<p>1) Products aren't turned into a commodity because of how they are priced. They are commoditized when many perfect substitutions exist in the market.<p>2) I'm not sure if "not predictable" will go over well with your audience. Maybe you could use your own product to help people predict their bill with you. It would be a neat application of your software.

It would be nice to have an explanation of what Keen.io does in the article. Actually, even after browsing your site I still don't have any idea what you guys do, besides collect data and visualize it. There also doesn't seem to be any indication of -how- you guys do visualization. It's hard for me to think about pricing for your service when I have no idea what you offer.

Whether you price by usage or have tiers, always do value pricing, not cost-plus pricing.

I've helped a number of companies put together pricing plans, and the first thing I usually say is "talk to your customers", so it's great that you are already doing that. However, the real question is not "how should I price this?" but "why is this awesome to you? (what is the value?)" You should absolutely price based on value-- if your value is greater than your cost, you can win. If not, you need to fix something. If you don't know what that value is, spend your time there, and the pricing will flow from that. As mentioned by others, you can always grandfather existing customers if you decide to change.<p>(That said, I'm guessing that simple tiers + custom enterprise plans if needed will be the way to go. The trick is figuring out how to set them up.)

I think the description of what you do is just too vague to give any feedback on how to price it. "collect, analyze, and visualize" data could mean almost anything. I even browsed through the docs and couldn't figure it out.<p>Do you have a full blown example use case of how a customer would use keen.io?<p>The getting started page shows an example of inserting an "event" and counting it, but I'm not sure what that means, or what the end goal is, exactly.

Our pricing at Repustate.com is fixed fee for a fixed quota of API calls. Usage-based billing sucks because of the unpredictability on both sides, plus it makes invoices much easier for us. Like others have mentioned here, predictable costs are good.

Keen looks to be another Mixpanel. I looked at mixpanel's pricing, and it sis nicely structured into tiers so one can estimate quickly how much it will cost based on the size of the business.<p>Mixpanel's pricing is utility based under the hood (they automatically pro-rate or upgrade the plan based on what is cheaper), but the marketing copy is tier based. That looks to be a good approach.