A tool to predict our startup's future
We needed a crystal ball to predict our SaaS startup's future.
Or a handy financial forecasting tool.
We checked the market for the latter and found these:
🛠️ LivePlan
🛠️ upmetrics
🛠️ Cuttles
Here's our evaluation:
LivePlan: https://liveplan.com
Pros:
- Flexible planning with customer numbers and price per unit; perfect for selling SaaS or digital products
- Annual payments are not distributed over time but accounted for the month they're due for precise cash flow predictions
- Dashboard to compare planning and actual numbers
- Planning up to 5 years
- Features are highly integrated
- Multi-language support
Okay:
O Benchmarking against similar businesses, but only with US data
O Recurring annual expenses get distributed over time and don't allow precise cash flow predictions. However, this can be overridden manually
Cons:
- Business plan tool is okay but weaker than other tools
Annual pricing: $144 - $288
upmetrics: https://upmetrics.co/
Pros:
- Flexible revenue and expense categories for financial planning
- Outstanding business plan tool
- Features are highly integrated
Okay:
O Good financial planning tool but no comparison with actual numbers
Con:
- Non-monthly payments get distributed over time and don't allow precise cash flow predictions. upmetrics only supports monthly payments. That's sad as otherwise, the tool is really great.
Annual pricing: $108 - $168
Cuttles: cuttles.io
Pros:
- Flexible financial planning period
- Features are highly integrated
- Nice planning tools
- Multi-language support
Okay:
O Nice business plan tool
Cons:
- Revenue planning is based on amounts, not on customer count and unit prices, which leads to less transparent numbers.
- Non-monthly payments get distributed over time and don't allow precise cash flow predictions.
Annual pricing: $96-192
What we did
We decided to go with LivePlan for now.
Why?
What convinced us is their support for SaaS pricing models as well as the feature to compare actual numbers with the forecasts.
upmetrics was second in our ranking because they can perfectly present the plans.
