👋🏼 SaaS companies are getting rid of freemium
Plus: 5 Principles to use your pricing page for effective storytelling.
SaaS Pricing is hard. PricingSaaS is your cheat code.
Monitor competitors, track real-time benchmarks, discover new strategies, and more.
Pricing Trend 🔮
Speaking of PricingSaaS, I’ve noticed an interesting trend recently on the platform.
SaaS companies seem to be increasingly getting rid of their freemium plans. 10+ companies have done so in the last two weeks alone.
The interesting part to me is that I’ve seen some anti-freemium sentiment on social media lately. Once the belle of the ball, lots of folks are discuss the downsides of Freemium.
Whether it’s due to economic belt-tightening, investors putting more pressure on monetization, or something else entirely — the trend makes sense.
In my manifesto on Freemium strategy, I broke down the 3 ways to do Freemium:
Free Trials (limited time)
Faux-Free Freemium plans (limited usage)
Perpetual free (often limited features/functionality)
The key with any of these options is having a plan for monetization. I suspect many of these companies are realizing this and going back to the drawing board.
Pricing Tactic 📋
Speaking of pricing pages, I recently came across a great post by Andreas Panayiotou, the Director of Pricing and Monetization at Notion Capital.
Andreas reviewed 200+ SaaS pricing pages 🤯 and boiled his findings down to 5 principles to use a pricing page for effective storytelling:
Build for someone: Offer packages with clear segments or personas in mind, enabling customers to self-select what’s right for them.
Use names that resonate: Select package names that resonate with your customers and reinforce each package’s proposition.
Clear value propositions: Utilize clear value propositions for each package, providing the reason to buy and the outcomes customers can expect.
Benefits not features: Clearly communicate the benefits of each feature, and avoid long lists of features with no context.
Offer expanding detail: Start with a digestible format, prioritizing what really matters up-front, and provide expanding detail where necessary.
The most exciting part of Andreas’ findings is that only 3% of companies are following all 5 principles — meaning there’s likely an opportunity to stand out in your category.
Community Wisdom 🧠
This week, a member of the GBB community asked how others are going about pricing research. Another member shared this framework, which I loved:
For B2C products and new offerings that the market hasn’t seen before, external surveys can be useful. If it’s a B2B product and the market is saturated, using internal data to do financial modeling/ analysis, talking to sales reps, and looking at what the competition is doing is the way to go.
If you have anything to add based on your experience, drop it in the comments. If you want to get in on the fun, learn more about a GBB Membership below.