GTM Plays from Notion, Statsig, Ahrefs, Smartsheet, and Wrike
Plus: Book time with Blue Rocket's Jason Kap.
Welcome back to Good Better Best.
If you’re a new subscriber from PricingSaaS, welcome aboard! John and I decided to join forces to deliver one weekly digest highlighting the most interesting plays across product, pricing, and packaging in the SaaS world.
Today, we’ve got 5 GTM updates to report:
Notion beefed up its plus plan
Smartsheet ditched freemium
Ahrefs added user limits
Wrike entered the GenAI game
Statsig clarified usage guardrails
Let’s get to it!
PS. Last week, I shared the PricingSaaS Q1 Benchmarks Report. If you missed it, check it out here, and grab access to the backend data for your own analysis here.
Sit Down with a True Pricing Expert
Today’s post is brought to you by Blue Rocket, a boutique pricing consultancy that works with some of the biggest players in SaaS.
Blue Rocket is led by Jason Kap, a SaaS pricing legend who spent 12 years leading pricing and licensing at Microsoft.
Jason has been generous enough to offer his time to let GBB readers:
Share specific pricing challenges and desired goals
Get feedback from someone who has transformed pricing at scale
Learn more about Blue Rocket’s pricing transformation philosophy
Having seen Jason’s work firsthand, I can’t recommend this enough.
Notion beefed up the Plus plan
As a Notion power-user, their updates are always of particular interest. Last week, Notion increased the price of the Plus plan by $2, and released a handful of new features, including Custom Websites, Automations, and Charts & Dashboards.
Wild to see this level of customization offered on an entry-level paid tier. Could be a testament to the portion of their customer base that are not on Team plans.
Regardless, it was cool to see them showcase the Custom Website feature in the Pricing Change notification email from CEO Ivan Zhao.
Zhao reminded recipients that Notion added 90 new features in 2023 alone, and collected all of them on a website page built in Notion.
Smartsheet ditched Freemium
Smartsheet is one of the OG project management applications, but Freemium always felt like a weird fit given their focus on the Enterprise (90% of the Fortune 100 are customers) and positioning (“the Enterprise work management platform”).
Last week, they got rid of their Free plan altogether.
A couple thoughts:
Smartsheet limited its free plan to 1 user and 2 editors. It’s hard to gauge the effectiveness of Enterprise project management tools on such a small scale.
I’d also guess the free plan was clogging Smartsheet’s sales pipeline, and burning valuable sales rep time trying to nurture/close unqualified prospects.
Overall, I like this move — Freemium isn’t for everybody, and this helps them focus on their true target customer.
Ahrefs added user limits
Ahrefs has a range of usage guardrails across its plans including Projects, Years of History, and Credits. Interestingly, their pricing page did not call out user limits.
Last week, they fixed that.
This makes a ton of sense to me on a few levels.
First, the limits seem well-aligned with how they position each plan:
Freelancers (Up to 5)
Small Teams (Up to 10)
Enterprises and Agencies (Unlimited)
Second, this should reduce friction during the sales process, and help the right prospects self-select the right plan.
Lastly, this is one more level to pull for monetization. I’d imagine Ahrefs assessed back-end user data before making the switch, and would expect this to help drive better monetization and expansionary revenue down the road.
Wrike entered the Generative AI game
Wrike is another work management platform that competes with Asana, Notion, Smartsheet, and others. Last week, they introduced a Generative AI feature on the Team plan, which is their first paid tier.
According to Wrike’s pricing page, the feature helps draft descriptions, project plans, and brainstorm documents.
Honestly, this release feels a bit late — Notion has been offering this functionality for a while now. What’s interesting to me is this suggests Generative AI is now viewed as a core feature — not an add-on or premium differentiator. Wrike’s Team plan is their entry-level paid tier, and costs $10 per month.
PS. For more on AI pricing strategy, check out the aforementioned Q1 Benchmarks Report, which has a whole section on AI.
Statsig clarified usage guardrails
Similar to Ahrefs above, Statsig make a tweak to the usage limits on its Pro plan. While the pricing page always showed limits for Metered Events, they clarified limits for Feature Flags, Session Replays, and Data Retention.
One of my favorite concepts in SaaS pricing and packaging is secondary value metrics. Two examples:
Hubspot’s primary value metric back in the day was Contacts, but a secondary value metric was Emails Sent.
Zoom’s primary value metric is users, but they famously limited meeting time on the free plan, and meeting attendees throughout plans.
As long as you can tell a coherent story about why the limits are structured how they are, it’s a smart way to drive monetization and expansionary revenue. Candidly, I do not know enough about Statsig’s customer base, but given they help customers measure feature usage and engagement, I’d hope they have some solid logic behind these numbers 😄
Thanks for tuning in and see you next week!
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