It is great to see this recently released report by Chart Mogul following their research in to over 600 SaaS Pricing Pages.
The whole report is worth reviewing if you are in the B2B SaaS business. Some of the key things I was interested to review include:
Optimal Number of Plans
I’ve always had a gut feeling that 3 was the ideal number of plans. I’m not quite sure where it came from but maybe it was from browsing a number of payment pages when I first looked into offering Subscription.
Anyway this report confirmed that 3 is the most popular number of plans on offer – whether or not that is actually optimal is harder to judge but maybe it is a fair assumption.
Incidentally, when we launched the Cadimage Tools on Subscription we opted for 3 plans!
Free Trials
Free Trials definitely appear the way to go with over 80% of companies offering some sort of free trail.
I was surprised however, that over 60% of free trials request card details up front. This is always an interesting debate as to whether asking for details up front presents another hurdle, however, in a sense it also most likely leads to higher conversion so there are different trade offs to measure.
Freemium
I wrote the other day about my thoughts on Freemium so it was interesting to see that less then 30% offered a Free Plan.
That said, Freemium is used extensively to grow ARR in the $100m – $1B range [ nice range 😉 ]
The reference to this article regarding “Monetizing backwards” still reinforced my thinking though.
Annual vrs Monthly
This one was more surprising especially with regards to the over 40% who don’t offer annual plans. I’m a firm believer that having annual and monthly payment plans help create a natural balance of lowest cost of entry, versus longer term customers.
Though that said, my own experience when introducing ArchiCAD Subscription was that I felt monthly was sufficient. Mainly because the entire exercise was to reduce the barrier to entry, and an annual pan would have been still too costly for the part of the market I was targeting at that stage.