Enterprise SaaS are losing ground to flexible alternatives.
Unless your product is entirely reliant on FTEs spending their days fully diving in, the pricing model is discriminative at best. ❌
Here are 4 cloud-based solutions I use and want to see remodeled.
1. Slack
Slack costs $8.75/user/month (or more) regardless of how you use it.
I pay for two orgs and participate in 10+ other workspaces.
There are tons of communities, peer groups, side hobby groups that stay on the “forever free” plan due to the lack of a better model.
I pay $119/year for a WordPress community gathering on Slack with 2K members. That’s effectively their monthly fee if they switch to paid. 👎
Instead of free, how about charging $200/mo for schools or communities, or $699/mo for 1,000 users for a tiered plan?
(And enforcing paid-only will result in an exodus to Discord, Telegram, or Teams).
2. Figma
My design and front-end teams are constantly tinkering with permissions, adding clients to collaborate, and switching between viewer/editor access. 🖼️
As a viewer, I can’t even export an image asset out of a file.
Some folks spend 6 hours a day in Figma crafting new designs and others need to access a text field twice in three months.
Usage-based or segmented accounts for non-professionals would work better.
Discriminative pricing.
3. Asana
Asana tried to build a fair model charging org users as members and everyone as guests. ✅
But org users are designated by the core domain used during sign up.
It’s great when clients, freelancers, vendors can join in and not be treated as full-time members.
But it’s also flawed on Asana’s end as corporations often run multiple properties and assign different emails to people.
Overcoming this by inviting any member of a sister company is just defeating the pricing model.
4. Semrush
We are a Semrush agency partner and I love the product.
However, while we have FTE doing SEO or competitive research full-time, we also want leadership to be able to run a quick review of a competitor before a client meeting or a demo. 📚
This may happen once a month or even once quarterly. But this offsets $45/mo/user extra within the global quota of searches or exports.
On top of that, additional users cost more when you upgrade to the next plan. Guru’s extra users are $80/mo and Business are $100/mo for each seat.
🧑🏫 While I wouldn’t change ships, costs add up increasingly due to static pricing models that don’t evolve.
There are upgrade paths to more revenue and no user caps.
