One-time payment tier for your SaaS
I want to structure my thoughts about the new format of payments in saas, which I hope will soon become popular.
One-time payment for a few days (most often 7 days) which allows you to use all the features of the service without restrictions and recurring payments.
What is the benefit for the user?
- the plan for a few days costs less than the monthly plan
- you can try all the features of the service without fear of forgetting about the subscription.
- less complicated interactions and setup.
- Less worries for the user — sometimes an early cancellation of a subscription cancels all the purchased features of the service before the end of the subscription (is doing this).
- Another subscription discourages. It may be easier to decide for a one time payment
What is the benefit for the service?
- More users can try the paid features (psychologically it is easier to decide for a one time payment, the cost is less).
- Less support and cancellations. Users won't write to support asking to cancel forgotten subscription. Or even worse, write directly to the payment service. This may result in fines or even blocking
- When users try out paid features of the service on single payments, they are more likely to subscribe to a monthly or annual subscription. This means that the service is useful and needed - better for ltv, retention, and other product metrics
- The ability to activate a user from a one-time subscription to a monthly or annual subscription.
If the user bought a one-time subscription more than 2 times, you can offer him an annual subscription at a discount or a monthly subscription at a small discount.
What's the difference from trial?
- The trial is a one time promotion. One time payment can be activated as many times as you wish.
- The trial is relevant for new users. One time payment is for those who have already used the service and the trial is already activated.
For which services is it good?
- I think that any saas services may try one time payment. The example of
LeaveMeAloneApp
shows that this payment option is relevant even for those saas that can be used every day
Examples
What do you think of this approach?
Maybe you know of examples of companies that use similar approaches?
Trending on Indie Hackers
Another interesting alternative to subscriptions is using credits. For eg: A customer pays $30 and gets 30 credits. 1 credit activates paid version of a product for a day.
This way, the customer can activate features whenever needed. This will remove headaches like prorated refunds, and gives more power to the customer. You can incentivize customers to buy more upfront with tiered discounts based on the number of credits bought.
The customer can top up on credits whenever there is an anticipated use of the product.
Ahrefs actually does this. They charge $7 for their 7 day trial. There's a Youtube video which covers why they charge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09avD7Y4xpc
I think it's more relevant for SaaS which actually have decent costs for servicing a trial user (relevant when the amount of data you're working with can go up significantly). If the costs for servicing a trial are close to 0, think there isn't much downside to offering a 7-14 day trial to everyone.
Yes, maybe you're right. Thanks for the ahrefs video.
This seems to be correlated with size and complexity of the solution and the size of the target customer ? This might work for smaller offerings, but how would this work for larger, more complex enterprise offerings?
Of course the Enterprise is a separate world. From what I know of the enterprise, it's very afraid of experimentation. Especially with the price. I suppose that one-time payment can be used in the enterprise, but you have to experiment. I don't think the problem will be the price. Paying $10,000 for 1 week of using the service when a month costs $15,000 is still a good deal for both parties.
But maybe using one-time payment for a product like notion or jira would be difficult.
Interesting approach.
I think this is awesome. I am increasingly frustrated with SaaS pricing as a user, especially when I get charged for another year when I'm not using the software or getting value from it. I do consulting for early teams. Committing to a SaaS, especially one that costs money per user, is a big decision. Sometimes that means some team members have access and others don't, which can cause issues.
Have you seen any examples of SaaS that ask each month if you want to keep it? Seems like something could be added on login. Users could also have an option at signup or in settings.
Saw this SaaS dark patterns article which might be of interest:
https://quolum.com/blog/saas/i-analyzed-saas-billing-dark-patterns/
Coda also has interesting billing based on what users actually make docs.
https://coda.io/pricing
Thank you! I agree that the creators of the service should remind about the next payments. And we are all tired of subscriptions and they often work too non-transparent and complicated.
I wrote a related thread about SaaS a month ago
I guess it can be a nice addition for certain products, giving a low-level access to the payed tier of the product - I guess when the product isn't obviously useful with a subscription. For Bootify it's definitly not "the winner" as well, but some developers opted for this option.
I agree. I want more indiehackers to experiment with pricing and know that there are different approaches. And maybe this information and our discussion will help someone look at their product differently.
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Thank you! I think one-time payment for your platform could be a great solution. Interesting that it didn't work before.
@leonix what is the thesis again? Is it that a super low price for a super short usage window will create more long-term business...reduce support...weed out unprofitable users....
@Primer seems like this would be very very specific to the way the platform or service is intended to be used. For personal music we typically like to hold onto the songs well after we played them....I don't 100% know what SongBox does but seems like the nature user would want longer periods of storage or sharing at a minimum.