Show HN: My new SaaS side-project, after years of open source
You should charge more :) Especially for your business plan -- any service targeted at enterprises should get you bare-minimum three figures of revenue per month, and you should look for a way to make it four or five, or have it scale up for large enterprises.<p>There are a few reasons for this:<p>1) The difference between $35 a month and $250 a month is a rounding error to most enterprises -- but for you, aggregated across all your business customers, it will make it much, much easier to grow and achieve profitability.<p>2) It&#x27;s easy to lower your prices if you receive consistent feedback that people really want your product but think it&#x27;s 30% too expensive or whatever. It&#x27;s very difficult to raise your prices once people are locked in at a lower monthly rate (especially if the rate is an order of magnitude lower than what you end up really needing to charge).<p>3) Businesses are used to paying a lot of money for software (sometimes up to seven or eight figures annually). For large enterprises, there is a counterintuitive psychological factor: they don&#x27;t trust something that costs $XX a month to reliably store their data and scale to their needs, and you&#x27;ll actually close more customers at $XXX or $XXXX a month.<p>4) Selling to enterprises is very costly -- they will (try to) run you through procurement, legal reviews, security reviews, terms of service negotiations, and a litany of other things. Your price point needs to take that cost into account -- you simply can&#x27;t make a profit from large enterprises if you have to spend a few thousand dollars of time&#x2F;resources getting them closed, and then you have to make it up $35 at a time.<p>Also, I agree with the other comment saying you shouldn&#x27;t offer a free plan, especially since your product is open source and they could self-host if they really wanted it. There&#x27;s an inversion of value -- free users still expect you to support them, and users in free&#x2F;cheap plans are often actually the noisiest for whatever reason. If I were you, I&#x27;d charge about $25&#x2F;mo for the basic feature set (maybe without the branding and with more than 50 form submissions); $99&#x2F;mo for the &quot;premium&quot; feature set; and &quot;call me&quot; for enterprises (hundreds to thousands a month depending on scale and commitment).