I think number of pages is a good metric for pricing plans. Maybe the numbers could use some tweaking (e.g. something between 200 and 50k), but this seems like a good differentiator among people and how much money they have to spend.
It also seems like a good way to divide people by their scale. You want a metric that means something to a customer, and one that they will bump into eventually.
What you could do to add value to the upper plans, is also offer hourly scans/on-demand scans/scans invokable by an API for the big customers.
I almost did that. Ultimately I decided to take an "it just works" philosophy to crawl frequency (unless you need realtime).
Would you segment the number of pages differently? I think some sites with a lot of user generated content might actually have a ton of pages. But it is hard to get real numbers.
They're undepriced, but I think the first problem is going to be going from 0 users to 10 users (bang down doors) rather than extracting the maximum proper value from those first ten users. The optimal pricing strategy will still lead to him having 0 customers until he figures out who needs this and how to reach them repeatedly.
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Perhaps you could use crawl frequency in your pricing. For example daily (or even hourly) crawls for the top tier plan.
Most people probably don't have that many pages so I'm thinking the existing pricing tiers might not work well?
And maybe offer a free plan that only crawls your site 3x per year or something really slow like that.
I think number of pages is a good metric for pricing plans. Maybe the numbers could use some tweaking (e.g. something between 200 and 50k), but this seems like a good differentiator among people and how much money they have to spend.
It also seems like a good way to divide people by their scale. You want a metric that means something to a customer, and one that they will bump into eventually.
What you could do to add value to the upper plans, is also offer hourly scans/on-demand scans/scans invokable by an API for the big customers.
I almost did that. Ultimately I decided to take an "it just works" philosophy to crawl frequency (unless you need realtime).
Would you segment the number of pages differently? I think some sites with a lot of user generated content might actually have a ton of pages. But it is hard to get real numbers.
Maybe Patio11 will chime in with some ideas for your pricing plans? Everything I know I got from reading his comments/blogs.
(I think he searches for mentions of his username, so the bat signal is officially turned on :-)
They're undepriced, but I think the first problem is going to be going from 0 users to 10 users (bang down doors) rather than extracting the maximum proper value from those first ten users. The optimal pricing strategy will still lead to him having 0 customers until he figures out who needs this and how to reach them repeatedly.
You're right. Getting these first ten is SO hard.
After I have ten customers, I will have much more information to base my prices and differentiators on.
Hmm I still like the crawl frequency as a price differentiator personally.
Other ideas might be a service level guarantee for the high priced plans. And included email support for setup.