Asking for feedback on my SaaS pricing strategy

To start with some context: I am building a matchmaking tool for the B2B trade fair industry. (Sars-COV-19 has put a halt on this right now, but I am sure we'll have real-life events again in the foreseeable future.) I've been at lots of trade fairs both as an attendee and as an exhibitor and I always found matchmaking to be incredibly inefficient and time-consuming.

My tool, in a nutshell, applies a chain of natural language text processing on elevator pitch videos uploaded by the attendees, and proposes matches automatically based on the information extracted. Organizers sign up for the application, set up an event and invite attendees to matchmaking. Attendees install a mobile app, redeem their invitation, view videos of other attendees and upload their own. (I wrote a more detailed posting about the project if you want to learn more.)

Unfortunately, a tool like this doesn't work well as a traditional SaaS subscription model due to the way the industry works, and I am still trying to wrap my head around the best pricing and also payment. I am sharing my train of thought here in the hopes of getting some useful feedback.

• While there are event organizers who arrange 10s or 100s of events per year, there are also many smaller organizers with just one event. A typical SaaS monthly subscription is not useful if the application is only used in a few weeks period around the event, e.g. 6 weeks before and 2 weeks after. That's why a monthly flat fee, even as a basis, doesn't make much sense from my perspective.

• The significant scaling factor for my expenses is not the number of event organizer personnel using the application, or the features used, but the number of attendees. So there's no use in charging "per seat". The biggest cost isn't even the computing power for language processing, it's the bandwidth for streaming videos back to the attendees. At an event where 1000 attendees participate in matchmaking and upload videos, and watch 50 videos of other attendees, that would result in ca. $150 cost for processing and streaming; with 10.000 videos and 100 watches per user it would be ca. $2200. (Obviously that depends on dozens of variables, like length/size of the video; I've calculated this in elaborate detail but that's not the point here.)

• As a consequence, I am currently considering charging per invited attendee. This is still fairly straight-forward and comprehensive for my customer, but it also bears the risk of getting into the reds if attendees consume significantly more videos and corresponding bandwidth than anticipated. The fact that not every invited attendee will participate hopefully makes up for that; that's a mixed calculation in the end.

• Obviously this is still far from recurring or in any way planable revenue. To mitigate this, I was thinking about offering a "prepaid attendee budget" which incentivizes organizers to prepay e.g. for their anticipated yearly attendee numbers, while getting a discount and being able to pay by bank transfer. As an alternative, I was thinking to offer a "pay as you go" option where I would charge non-discounted bulks on a stored credit card. Unfortunately, this would break once credit card limits were hit, e.g. if I were to charge $1 per attendee, 5000 invited attendees and a charge of $5000 would probably result in a declined authorization and I would have to run after the money.

• As part of the go-to-market strategy, I want to offer ca. 100 attendees per month for free and then try to get meetups on board (and probably finance this through ads related to the meetup topic/location). This would be a great way to spread the word and test the waters with smaller audiences.

• I will start with English and German speaking audiences first because I am able to support these languages myself and wouldn't be able to e.g. judge the quality of transcription in other languages.

If you've made it until this point, I would love to hear your thoughts: Does an attendee based pricing make sense or is there a better way I haven't thought of yet? Are you aware of SaaS businesses with similar challenges for inspiration? And, jackpot question, do you have any insights into event software yourself and are up for a chat?

Thanks!