Inlistio

This is the future, guys. I'm so glad none of these companies are trying to force-fit SaaS onto what should obviously be metered billing.

• Google API
• Azure marketplace
• AWS
• Heroku and most hosts

Here are five reasons to switch to metered billing. Eventually I'll turn this into a larger blog post.

1. No more grandfathering. Metered pricing changes immediately impact everyone because there's no unit pricing baked into plan (e.g. events/$, emails/$, contacts/$, leads/$).

2. Superfluous gating is bad practice. It's easy to tell when an entrepreneur is force-fitting SaaS by gating features that make no sense to gate because they actually make the product harder to use. It's self-defeating.

3. See my earlier comment. I got a $1,500 customer completely self-serve. You can get enterprise ARPU with SMB speed.

4. Diversify your customer base. Five $9 users is better than one $45 user.

5. Straight lines are better than steps. As a 3rd party data consumer, I find it completely obnoxious that I can’t granularly “upgrade” my plan. Why do I have to jump between a $199/mo plan and a $499/mo plan? Just because your marketing leader said so? Bah.

Yesterday something really cool happened. I was doing my normal stuff, checking on metrics, responding to emails, when I got an alert that there was a bunch of activity on Inlistio.

Normally I don't check my Inlistio metrics because, well, you see the revenue. It's something but it's not much. Most of my attention is on Toofr log errors and processor retries. So it was odd to see a spike in Inlistio activity.

I toggle over there and BOOM, somebody uploaded a massive list to process. I check him out, make sure he got the $49/mo subscription (like Toofr it's a metered billing deal with a single low monthly membership). The thing is his list was over 35K records. You can see the pricing on https://www.inlistio.com/pricing. That's about $1,500 in usage fees.

If he sticks around, that'll turn into $1,500 per month in tracking fees. In ARR terms, that's $18K. Not bad for a customer I never heard from, never got an email from, never spoke to on the phone.

I think that's the magic of metered. It looks small but packs a large punch. It's a $49 plan that could easily become $1-2K once the customer gets hooked.