Yeah, I was curious what people would think of that. My logic is that resource usage for end-to-end encryption scales exponentially, not linearly, and it's also a more expensive problem for a larger company to deal with (either in terms of engineering time or dealing with a breach).

I've been planning to add additional perks to the larger tiers over time though. For example, I'm now working on audit logs, and will likely limit the amount of history for the lowest plan (sort of like Slack).

On the per-user pricing, how do you think about the possibility of a company that signs up with just a few users but manages hundreds of servers through the product?

Just limit the number of environments and keys that can be managed on each tier. 3 environments and 5 keys at the low end, 20 and 50 at the high end with a "call us" option for super heavy use.

Even if you can't rate limit in your current release it's in the license and when you can you move people up to a higher tier. This solves the issue of charging larger customers more without them getting more value.

Unlimited number of users, files, etc should never be part of a public pricing tier. Fine for a negotiated agreement with an enterprise that has a definite period - it's a great thing to concede to close an enterprise deal and should be essentially costless. When it is in a public price list it makes larger sales much, much harder.

I think this is a non-problem now. As of now, you want to grow your user base as much as possible. Since all your users are paying, you are not carrying a dead weight of freemium. Build up user count by any means possible. Only once you will see a significant drop in growth of revenue try to upsell current user base by adding important features.

Keep, for example, Cloudflare in mind. They have first built their user base, and once they were used by thousands of companies, they started offering additional options, Enterprise ($2K+) accounts etc. Focus on growth first, and keep some aces in your pocket for the time your revenue will stall. This way you will be able to be innovative whenever growth is slow, and there is a possibility a competitor will show up and take your business.

Thank you for this comment. I think it's spot on with keeping some aces in your pocket for appropriate time. It's not fun to keep onto unreleased features, but the product should continue to grow with time. If one wants to increase prices, ideally this goes along with added features.

There's nothing wrong with same features at all price points - he's allowing more users the higher the prices go.

I used to work at NetSuite and this is exactly how we did it, the real cost (after any consulting) is the cost of users.

We exited to Oracle for 9billion.

You cannot compare billion dollars established a company, existing years ago, to today's SaaS startup. It is like comparing solutions form 2010 car to 2016 car. Web market changes fast.

That doesn't mean anything.

You can charge more for more users, there's nothing wrong with that model. The more resources you require, the more you pay.

My opinion is not binary. While I understand your point of view, I think, that there is much more optimized and valuable revenue models for SaaS startups.