When do you start charging for SaaS as an IndieMaker?
I've released a few products now that I have charged for from (almost) the beginning.
For my latest product, I'm a few months into the beta and am not yet charging, but considering doing so in the next month.
At what point do you usually decide to put a price tag on your SaaS? Do you feel comfortable doing it when you still have some (critical) bugs to iron out?
When building Sitesauce I decided to charge right from the alpha. I did this for two reasons:
Firstly, it's a great way to validate your idea. You can talk to customers or get emails, but asking them to pay is the ultimate validation.
I've also learned that if you offer your app for free it's more difficult to later start charging for your service.
As they say, the best moment was when you started building your app, the second best moment is now :D
Sold! I agree, the longer it goes on the harder it seems to start charging but I need to know if people are prepared to pay at this stage before I sink another 6 months of dev time into the product.
I released a mobile app for free to gauge interest, but if I was making a real Saas product I would charge from day 1.
I started to charge for OOPSpam Anti-Spam API from the very beginning.
If you bring value to a customer, there's no shame to charge them for it. It'll also weed out unnecessary issues.
So, charge as soon as possible. You can always offer a free plan anyway.
Try to always charge from the beginning. If you really don't feel comfortable because of missing features or bugs, you can do a alpha/beta discount for a fixed amount of months. You still get the assurance that they really want to pull their creditcard for your product, they get a good deal while you iron out the wrinkles.
That's what I'm thinking, full access to all beta features for a discounted price initially.
For Versoly we started right from the beginning . The product instantly brought value for our customers so we wanted to make sure they would buy it.
If you have a lot of bugs or big bugs I would fix them before charging, however all software has bugs it will never be perfect.
The bugs are pretty minor, and I need to accept that there's always going to be new bugs with the introduction of third-party integrations.