Despite the advice to add enterprise pricing — advice which I’ve given in the past too — I think you’ve done exactly the right thing with your pricing.

Pricing is a form a bike shedding. You can spend an infinite amount of time worrying about it, and there is no one right answer.

But one thing that a fixed price of $49/mo regardless of team size will do for you is put a hard cap on how much you will work on closing a single account.

Even assuming a very sticky product, by fixing the price your guaranteeing a whale isn’t going to show up in your inbox, promise the world if only features X, Y, Z existed, get you running in circles chasing that ghost, and then disappear without paying a dime, leaving with a pile of code that adds no value to your true customer base.

This pattern is extremely common for small companies that dream of being the next Enterprise SaaS, and the big companies with high probability will never buy from you, but will have no problem dangling carrots that waste your extremely valuable cycles.

Fixing the price is a very overt way to maintain focus and declare that you are going to own your own feature set and build the product you want to build, take it or leave it.

As a sole proprietor this is the safest way for you to grow your company at this stage.

Ignore all pricing discussions and just focus like hell on features that increase your SAM (the number of customers who could actually use your product), your reach (the percentage of your SAM that know you exist) and your conversion (the percentage of people who know you exist that ever actually pay you money).

Also remember that when you start out, the customers you have are not always the customers you want. The low monthly price is a great way to say, tell me what you like and don’t like, but don’t expect me to move mountains to build something special for you.

Agreed, I do this as well.

Also, Basecamp: https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-never-sold-basecamp-by-the...

This is my first comment in HN. That's a very good advice.

Thank you for taking the time to share this :)!

So if a firm with 50,000 employees signs up, you'll charge them $49?

You should reconsider this pricing model because a client of any considerable size is both able and willing to pay for a product that is financially stable. $49 won't keep the lights on, and the fear of investing time and data into a system that won't survive financially due to poor pricing might scare off some potential customers.

This is an unnecessary worry. How about they cross that bridge when they get there? If they spent time worrying about all that _could_ go wrong, they’d of never have built anything.

People who spend time worrying about what could go wrong don’t make good business operators. The truth is, when you get a business off the ground so many things go fantastically wrong and so many go fantastically right and you’ll have not anticipated any of it.

Let the person who built this CRM focus on the only thing they really need to worry about: building an awesome product and getting people to pay them for it.

I normally agree with deferring features, but in this case protecting (/preparing) yourself from this scenario is a very simple change (add a second / third price point). You don't even have to do anything to support it, other than put it there and deal with it if / when that number of people do sign up.

part of getting people to pay for it is pricing it properly. No business in their right mind would trust a tool that costs 49/mo for 50k users.

Yeah because you know, NOW really is the best time to prepare themselves for being the next Salesforce or Office 365.

Don't you think it's a just little premature for that scale of thinking? I mean, they just got the thing posted on HN.

I think there is somewhere in between a startup and Salesforce size - at this pricing, even small businesses are going to be wary.

$49/m is just so obviously underpriced that it rings alarm bells - how could that possibly be sustainable, will it still be around in 6 months?

It’s not that - it’s that as a 6-person team who is a target customer, I don’t want to get a bunch of my data locked in to a system that’s not priced to sustain the company.

I mean Basecamp is $99/mo. And it has a bunch more features. I don't know about you but I'd say they run a sustainable business.

CRMs are usually ridiculously overpriced.

Hey!

The company is just me and I'm not trying to land huge customers. Therefore I need no marketing or customer support team. I'm building it for myself and other small businesses. I think I can make that sustainable. I also have no interest in being acquired so you won't have to worry about that either :).

It's not premature. It sets expectations. If you can't set expectations for the buyer, they just won't buy.

You don’t have to build the feature, just add a “contact us” button for > users. Building enterprise grade features is a pre-mature optimizations.

Setting expectations and putting people in the right funnel is not. Especially if it’s a cheap change like adding a button.

Is that their target market?

Thanks John :)

Sure. And don't sweat the comments about "it doesn't do anything new blah blah."

I built an eBay feedback reminder (that's had over 15,000 paying users over the course of its life).

Here's the thing: eBay already sends feedback reminders and people pay to use mine anyway because of some minor differences (and then there are customers who don't know eBay sends feedback reminders).

Pretty much every nay say anyone who hasn't succeeded in business could give you is total fluff.

I don't think that big of a firm will sign up. I'm building a CRM for small businesses and makers. I don't think that large firms would enjoy it.

Still useful to have. The most basic version would be something like:

1. up to 10 users: $49/mo

2. 11–25 users: $99/mo

3. 26–100 users: $199/mo

4. 101+ users: call me

EDIT:

As anyone who has tried to buy a CRM will know, these prices are crazy low. Which is a good thing!

> As anyone who has tried to buy a CRM will know, these prices are crazy low. Which is a good thing!

No, no it's not. CRM is incredibly valuable to any business and if your software provider can't sustain it's own businesses because they charge too little, the last thing you want to deal with is switching costs (direct costs and hassle) when they go under.

You're right about the switching costs if an SaaS provider goes under. But assuming $50/month is unsustainable for the feature set and service guarantees this company provides seems, well, to assume a lot. If they were trying to provide features competitive with Salesforce, maybe, but are they? (And can we really be sure that Salesforce would collapse if they weren't charging $150/user/mo for their "most popular" plan?)

Even if you are able to get 1,000 customers at $50/month, that's only $50k/month or $600k/year. That's barely enough to provide enough support personnel and hosting costs alone to support 1k clients.

Sure! I like to keep it simple. Might add it in the future :).

> don't think that big of a firm will sign up.

Better make sure they don't then so you won't have to support a large company that signed up because of the low price.

Some problems you want to have. A huge firm signing up is definitely a problem you want to have.

I was first introduced to this concept by a colleague who was going to serve customers manually instead of us programmers automating it. I said he was going to have a major issue when lots of people sign up. He replied "That is definitely a problem I want to have, I hope I get completely overloaded, because then we have the money to automate it".

I guess it is related to Paul Grahams "do things that don't scale", but "problem I want to have" is broader.

Since then I always evaluate if certain problems are the ones I want to have, because then I know I can postpone them.

> because then we have the money to automate it

I think you are missing the point that in this case you _don't_ have the money.

I am sure they are perfectly able to negotiate once the usage gets out of hand.

If a big company with 50,000 employees is your customer, you must be pretty blind or stubborn to not get the money you want.

The problem is what zaroth outlined at the start of this thread: the big company doesn't start as your customer. They start out as "Hi, we're a Fortune 500 company and we'll become your Number One Customer if you jump through these hoops...before we sign a contract!" And you start jumping. And there are more hoops. And you jump. And they have a strategy change and blow you off for six months, then come back with a different set of hoops. And you jump. And you jump. And you've spent hundreds of thousand of dollars for the promise of getting that big customer, on the belief that they'll surely sign and that other customers of their size will follow.

And they don't sign.

And it turns out what you worked on for them isn't something other customers of their size really quite want. But if you jump through these hoops...

If they don't start as your customer, then there is no problem in the first place.

If they are your customer, there's no more hoops to jump through.

I don't see the problem you are describing here.

Supporting thousands of users from a huge firm, while only charging them $49, is not a problem you want to have. You're just giving away resources at that point.

No, you're letting them start to depend on the tool which allows you to renegotiate for a good deal later

$49 for thousands of users is basically free. For a CRM, a company with a 2000 seat license should be paying well into the tens of thousands of dollars a year, if not significantly more.

You don't renegotiate from $49 to $60,000...

Renegotiate? You probably mean changing the license terms. Way easier.

yeah. if you have 50k employees, you are already using salesforce with a LOT of custom code/workflow.

a lot people seem to forget that there's a lot of b2b on the small-to-medium size.

Even for a 100 people size company, charging $49 IS giveaway.

basecamp manages it. They charge a flat fee, no matter how many users: https://basecamp.com/pricing

They blogged (alas can't find the link now) they did that deliberately in order not to be beholden to larger customers, they wanted to treat all customers equally.

Couldn't they choose to not be beholden to larger customers regardless of the pricing? That seems like a business choice that is independent of the pricing model.

Alas I can't find the link, it was a really great article, I've just spent about 10 minutes searching for it.

From memory, their logic was that even if you decide to treat all customers equally, if you have one customer with 1k seats paying $30k, and another with 1 seat paying $30, you'll just end up treating the customers differently, it's just human nature, and there's nothing you can really do about that.

Here it is: https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-never-sold-basecamp-by-the...

Maybe the feedback here is to make that clearer, without knowing much that sounds like a huge selling point compared to your competition, so you should pull attention to it. This is what your website says right now:

> Start your 7 day free trial now. After that it's $49 per month, total.

How about clarifying it to something like:

> 7 day free trial: after that unlimited users costs $49 per month. That's for your entire team!

Something that brings home the point of how much of a difference this is compared to the "per-agent" pricing that's pretty much standard.

I'll leave it to others to decide how viable this pricing is :-)

EDIT: Also, just wanted to let you know there's a typo on https://wobaka.com/#/sign-up

> That's a total, no matter how many people --> your <-- are.

Thanks! I don't really want to compete on price so that's why I'm not highlighting it more. I just want to speak to small business owners :). Fixing the typo now!

> I don't really want to compete on price

If that is the case, can I ask why you are not mirroring the pricing of your competitors more? If you're not competing on price, what are you competing on?

Because I don't like it. And for small businesses I don't think it makes sense because team members end up sharing accounts and it just becomes a mess of who did what.

I'm competing on making a CRM that's actually enjoyable to use and not just a way to keep track of your sales team :).