How Do You Solve a Problem Like SaaS Pricing?

There’s been plenty of discussion at the GorillaStack HQ recently about how we price our suite of products.

The first obvious thing to state is that we’re the only product in the market that confronts AWS billing solutions by focusing on the usage variables around both EC2 cycling and users’ Auto-Scaling configurations. In that sense it’s difficult to draw a comparison with competitors. In another sense, there are a large number of tools that use Reserved Instances (RI) to drive cost savings for businesses. More often than not, they tend towards a model based on a percentage of total AWS bill monitored.

At GorillaStack we believe it’s important to consider those models but that any deep comparison with RI focused products is disingenuous, not least because any RI savings require a considerable investment upfront – as compared to our service which provides immediate savings and requires no extra investment into your AWS services. Beyond that there’s the question of how you quantify the intangible operational benefits – GorillaStack gives you the ability to efficiently administer considerable modifications to your AWS environment with just a few clicks.

As is publicly available on our pricing page, we’re currently offering our service for free with a vision of charging customers in the coming months. This period is extremely important to us for assessing user feedback and we’re emphatic that we don’t want to pull any “bait and switch” tactics when it comes to charging our customers. There is no lock-in to our product currently so you can disconnect an AWS account at any point – it’s risk free. Furthermore, we’ll be reaching out to all our customers well in advance of establishing any pricing model – it’s important that we collaborate to work out what value we are driving for businesses and therefore what makes sense for them.

Therein lies the core question – what’s the real value are we providing to users and how do we create a structure that is fair for all users?

How do we best measure both (i) the qualitative value we provide in helping organizations create a culture of cost management and empowering developers to be more accountable for their infrastructure; and (ii) the quantitative value of the actual cost savings and operational efficiencies that our product drives?

For the deepest insights we’ve found the Price Intelligently blog to be particularly informative across all aspects of this conundrum.

Some of the clearest takeaway from research has been that we should in fact be charging by value we add, and not necessarily in relation to our business expenses. The second clearest consideration is that our model should be able to scale and grow with the businesses we are serving, it’s important to be sure that our plans are always in service of the end customer and their growing needs.

So, watch this space as our ideas evolve, and in the meantime please get in touch with your thoughts and suggestions for our pricing.