I'm planning to offer a free plan for my B2B SaaS platform designed for ecommerce businesses.
Part of the service is online software that integrates with their store but the other involves sending a piece of technology we invented to their customers' home addresses in the mail. Each time this is sent, our client pays us $2.
So the platform itself is free but there are usage charges. Is this model called something in particular? Is it SaaS?
#tech-questions
Interesting. Do you have a landing page that we could look at?
I hate the word "free" in the B2B world. Why not a trial and then ask for money later. Generating cash is so important if you want to stay alive! Have you considered any upselling strategies?
I agree with @jlogic you can still consider this a version of SaaS, but I would call this execution metered billing (throughput x unit price).
A variation/option that I see accompany this is typically a predefined monthly commitment for a price break. So $2/unit or $180/month for 200 units, or whatever makes sense based on cost/volume.
That actually sounds like B2B2C, if I'm understanding correctly. If I got that right, it's a legit business model.
I think it is still SaaS but with usage based pricing. Not unlike Twilio, which I believe is considered a SaaS.