Why our SaaS costs $29/month
Even before I decided my company would build Feature Upvote, I knew the price would be $29/month for the standard plan.
A price without a product? How can that be?
Because I didn’t yet know what product to build, but I knew exactly the type of customer I was aiming at.

For years, my company has had one product, a desktop app aimed at consumers, which sells for a single payment of less than $100. That product is mature, so it was time for us to add a new product to our portfolio. But we wanted a different type of product. This new product would be for a different type of customer.
The customer would be a business, not a consumer. To use industry jargon, it would be B2B (business-to-business) and not B2C (business-to-consumer). Business customers are less price-conscious and more aware of the value a product offers them in. This would allow us to charge more over the long term. Again using jargon, our customers would have a greater LTV (lifetime value).
The customer would be content with support being available Monday to Friday, during business hours. That’s because the customer wouldn’t like working on weekends. We’ve been supporting consumers seven days a week all year long for years, and it is exhausting.
The customer would be happy paying a monthly subscription fee rather than a once-off payment. Subscription products offer a stable and regular financial basis that once-off payments can’t match, both for us and for customers.
The customer would want the product to be “in the cloud”, or hosted by us. The customer wouldn’t want the trouble of installing and running our product on their own hardware. They wouldn’t want the security concerns or update hassles. We’d silently update our product every week or so, and customers wouldn’t care or know, except when they spotted a new feature they had been waiting for. We’d know that all our customers were using the latest version, making support much easier.
The customer would be a business like ours: a small company with a product that already has traction, and is able and willing to pay a monthly fee for a product that saves them time and provides them with value. The owner of the business would be the decision maker, able to instantly commit to our product. The business would be well-run and the owner price-conscious, so that we would need to keep the standard pricing reasonable.
Now I knew what customer I wanted, I needed to guess what they’d be willing to pay. I assessed my own attitude to subscribing to cloud-based “software as a service” offerings for my own business. I noticed that $29/month was the maximum price at which I was happy to sign up without too much concern, and more importantly, to stay signed up even if some months we weren’t fully using the service.
Would $29/month work as a standard pricing point? I tested various what-if scenarios: what if we were able to eventually attract X new website visitors per month, of which Y signed up for a trial, and Z subsequently became paying customers? How long could we expect customers to keep paying? What were the costs of running a B2B SaaS? I tried reasonable numbers in my what-if scenarios and the results seemed credible.
I concluded that $29/month would work. As a pricing point for a standard plan, for a “B2B SaaS” run by a small team, it works.
I didn’t know what the product would be, but I knew it would be something for which $29/month was a reasonable price.
Spoiler alert: the $29/month product became Feature Upvote, an affordable way to manage customer feedback for your product.
Try out Feature Upvote to see how you can let your customers openly suggest and upvote improvements to your product. Sign up for a free fully-functioning trial of Feature Upvote.
