Welcome back to Good Better Best!
Today, we’re sharing the most popular posts of 2024 and some of the high-level themes we’ll be watching in the new year.
This is the last post of the year. We’ll be back the first week in January with a case study on Superhuman’s recent pricing change (with commentary from the team that executed it). Stay tuned!
Thank you for reading. Hope you all get to rest and recharge over the holidays.
🚨 SaaS Product and Pricing News
Sprout Social removed a feature.
Moz removed discounts.
Veed tweaked usage limits.
Klaviyo added usage sliders.
Ahrefs updated features.
The 5 Most Popular Posts of the Year
I’m a big fan of Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, and love his annual recap of the most popular posts of the year. Since a lot of new subscribers have joined recently, I thought it would be helpful to share some of the most popular posts of 2024. Interestingly, the top 5 posts each represent a different format.
1. A Guide to Pricing Research, Part 1
This post was part of a 4-part series with Pat Meegan, who leads pricing strategy at IGS and has worked with hundreds of PE-backed SaaS companies on pricing. We covered quantitative and qualitative research strategies, survey vendors, research design principles, and more. It’s jam-packed.
2. Deconstructing Clay’s Pricing Strategy
Clay is one of the buzziest companies in SaaS, which likely contributed to the popularity of this post. I also think they have a fascinating pricing strategy, and offer one of the better examples of a modern SaaS company with an iterative approach to pricing. This was also one of the first case studies where we got feedback from the team behind the change. This is a post-style I plan to do more of in 2025, starting with Superhuman.
3. 10 SaaS Monetization Tactics
This post featured a simple list of 10 pricing updates we saw at PricingSaaS, organized by objective. We had a lot of fun with this one, and can definitely do more of these in 2025. In our experience, people love real-world examples — and the quick, clear style of this post made for an efficient read.
4. The Good and Bad of Canva’s Price Increase
We don’t do much news commentary, but Canva’s pricing change was a hot topic, and raised many debates about how to coordinate a price increase. TLDR, don’t wait too long to change prices, and when you do, give customers time to figure it out.
5. Pricing Roundup: Breakdowns for Monday, Loom, and Klaviyo
This roundup post did a quick breakdown of some interesting updates across 3 of the most interesting players in SaaS. It’s almost like a digest of mini case studies.
We’d love your feedback. If you have a strong opinion on your favorite post format (e.g., Resources, Case Study, Listicle, News Commentary, Roundup), hit the comments or shoot me a note on LinkedIn. Otherwise, we’ll keep mixing it up 🙂
🙏🏼 A Quick Ask
We partnered with the team at Benchmarkit to support their State of Usage and Value Based Billing Benchmarks report. If you have time between last-minute Christmas shopping, we’d love your input. Take the survey here 🫡
5 Themes to Watch in 2025
It’s been a busy year in SaaS pricing. To wrap up the year, we wanted to highlight 5 pricing themes that we’ll be watching in the new year.
1. AI Monetization
This one’s a no-brainer. AI has been the pricing topic of 2024. As more SaaS players dive in, we’ll be watching to see which pricing models are most popular.
→ Outcome-based pricing like Intercom?
→ An add-on like Notion?
→ A premium AI plan like Loom?
2. Seat Creativity
Lost in the hype around outcome-based pricing, is that seat-based pricing isn’t dead at all. In fact, some of the sharpest players in SaaS are starting to innovate on their seat-based models.
→ Intercom added “Lite” seats as a new differentiator between premium tiers.
→ Ahrefs created an escalating cost per additional user across its core plans.
→ Canva raised the user minimum on its Teams plan from 2 to 3.
3. Customer Support
Speaking of outcome-based pricing, the future of customer support is evolving in front of our eyes. The capabilities of generative AI are raising interesting questions about where humans fit in.
→ Will more companies default to AI support like beehiiv?
→ Or offer personalized onboarding across the board like Pipedrive?
4. Pricing Page Enhancements
My party line is that the pricing page is the clearest distillation of product and strategy. We saw a lot of cool innovations on pricing pages this year that provided insight into evolving product roadmaps, ICPs, and multi-product strategies.
→ Dovetail teased new features pre-launch.
→ Monday adjusted user defaults to target a new persona.
→ Klaviyo added an in-plan calculator.
5. Pricing Documentation
As pricing grows more important (and complex) having a distinct perspective will be an advantage for SaaS companies. I expect more companies to take documentation seriously as they launch and iterate on pricing. Some favorites include:
→ Clay’s Credit Scenario Table:
→ Statsig’s pricing philosophy:
→ beehiiv’s competitive pricing table:
That’s it for this week (and year).
Have a wonderful holiday season and we’ll see you in 2025! 👋🏼
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Ahrefs is also moving Reports to a paid add-on. Same goes with a bunch of project-based add-ons.
Good stuff. Have you read the 1999 paper "Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits and Efficiency" by Yannis Bakos and Erik Brynjolfsson? Interesting data and theory on how law of large numbers drives higher pricing certainty in bundled offerings. I am putting together a piece on bundled pricing, so happened to be reading it. You should check it out!