[krmmalik]

I will never understand why so many products offer saas pricing when it is of no benefit to the consumer. I don't want to be paying $10/month for something I might only use a few times a year. Just let me pay as I go. I'm relieved to see that model here. Finally. I signed up and I hope other services will follow suit in the same way and relieve us of saas pricing fatigue.

Interestingly a startup I helped with some BI work, I advised then to change to a pay-as-you-go model instead of a monthly subscription and their sales revenue sky-rocketed.

[virgilp]

The counter-argument to that is that pay-per-use discourages usage: "every time you use it, you pay" encourages you to be mindful about how much you use. You may not binge entire series on Netflix if you have to pay for each episode. You may justify a Photoshop subscription so that you have a powerful tool ready whenever you need it, but maybe you would think twice about making a meme if you had to pay for it (with money not just time).

I think it really depends on usecase. For something like e-signature, I can totally see how "pay per signature" makes sense - you wouldn't sign less documents to save a buck! On the contrary, you'd be comfortable keeping a contract knowing you only pay what you use, if you don't sign documents in a month, you pay nothing. So here probably a "subscription" model is a much harder sell.

[jacobr1]

Also there is a difference at a firm level and an individual user. If I have a company where this is used all the time (real-estate agency, law firm, etc) I might want the all-you-can-eat subscription model and not worry about usage. In fact, I might buy extras like white-label branding.

But for personal use or occasional use, yeah, being limited to subscription plans really sucks.

[krmmalik]

I agree. It is dependent on use-case but the majority of startups backed by VC choose the SaaS pricing model by default.

I do agree that in the case of something like Netflix a monthly subscription is a good idea, but there are many instances where pay as you go can work so much better.

[mysterydip]

Most recent example of this for me was a faxing app. I needed to fax a handful of pages for the first (and probably only) time in years, and they wanted me to sign up for a monthly subscription.

[stackedinserter]

I'm tired of modern "subscriptions everywhere" too, but OTOH SaaS is burning money even if nobody's using it at the moment. AWS doesn't care if EC2 instance is idling :-) That cost is either included in pay-as-you-go price, or paid as a subscription fee.

[bottled_poe]

Don’t use ec2 then?

[cosmolev]

Would you mind sharing that startup you advised?

[krmmalik]

Viddyoze.com

[nojito]

Pay as you go doesn’t scale.

It’s chasing short term growth in lieu of long term stability.

[voisin]

Pay as you Go scales until there is enough loyalty and demand that your users opt for a monthly fee to save money. By forcing everyone to a monthly fee you alienate a ton of users that want to use your service but not enough to need a subscription.

[mdavis6890]

They need to charge enough per unit of service to make it worthwhile. And people need to understand that they need to pay for services. Not everything is free.

Subscriptions are a good model for things that you use often and regularly. PAYG is better for things that have high value when you need them, but you don't need often.

I can see services like this offering both, and customers choosing one or the other based on their usage pattern.

You see this with movies already, and I think it works well: You can subscribe to the monthly and watch whatever, whenever. Or just rent movies when you occasionally want to watch one. Both are cool.

[ClumsyPilot]

Well, you can't have it. If I need a service once a year, I won't pay a monthly subscribtion.

[itisit]

Cloud providers are pay-as-you-go, and as far as I can tell, they scale!

[vmception]

Yes rip offs scale

Stop scamming people