Would higher pricing be seen as a guarantee of better quality?
I'm trying to find out the best pricing for my product (charts for notion) datajumbo.co
My only active competitor has already priced his product USD 4/mo. I'm thinking about having a slightly higher price, also to signal a better quality of a product. What is your thought on that strategy?
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While reading through a bunch of Indie Hackers interviews, I've noticed this recurring pattern of founders saying they increased their prices and then suddenly getting more paid users as a result.
This was mostly in the B2B SaaS niche, though. It makes sense when you think about it; when you have a product-market fit and a firm finds your product to be useful, they might be thinking: "Whoa, these guys are solving a problem that's costing us $30,000 a year. Yet, they charge $30/mo. Something must be off."
It's interesting because in B2B SaaS we have the totally opposite problem compared to e-commerce; in e-commerce you often have a commodity product and you're trying to increase the price; in B2B SaaS you often have a pretty unique product and you don't realize how big of a problem it's probably solving so you decrease the price.
Good observation.
The battle between production value ( the cost to build and maintain ), and benefit ( money saved by using the product ).
We should think the same when dealing with general stuff buying. I read an article a long time ago, it was saying: Put your money where you time is, or something like that. The author was trying to explain that you should invest more money buying a better bed ( where you spend 8-10 hours ), desk+chair ( 6-10 hours ), and spend less money on things that you use rarely. He was explaining that most people think opposite, they spend more money on things they rarely use, while spending less money on things they use many hours a day, like bed, mattress, desk, etc.
That's so true! And the reasoning behind it is so interesting. Makes me think of relationships, we can be so nice to new people while being so boring with the closest ones. That should be the opposite.
I should definitely exploit that idea in my marketing to talk to the daily users of Notion. They use it every day, their Notion workspace deserves to be treated well
The problem is that Notion is mostly B2C, used for personal projects, notes, habit tracking, school assignments, etc.
But maybe I'm wrong... Are there any stats on how many businesses are using Notion?
You're right it's mostly B2C, but there's definitely a user base of pros and companies, at least from my user base. That's also what I'm trying to figure out in my pricing.
I agree with this. I can’t think of a single SaaS that we pay for that’s less than $50 a month. Most of our products that we pay for our $100 a month.
If I was shopping for a solution and it was $9 a month, I would think that must be a consumer product and won’t be a good fit for my business.
Pricing is a signal of quality, but things should be taken in context. People use pricing together with other things to assess if something is trustworthy/high quality.
Putting a higher price together with testimonials, pretty product demos/pictures, a greatly designed website and careful copywriting might be a way to construct an environment that would lead people to see things as coherent and believe the pricing is worthy.
I think "guarantee" is a bit of a stretch, but it could be an "indication" of better quality. So, I don't think it's a bad strategy at all. But you'd need to ensure it is better quality, or at least not worse quality than your competitor. Otherwise, success might not be long-lived; you'd likely struggle to retain customers, and if the word got out, potentially struggle to attract new ones.
Heya @giardiv 👋,
As others noted, it's not a guarantee. The opposite is true as well. Low pricing, for a product that's business critical, can certainly be a red flag.
I'm not sure where you are on your journey in launching Data Jumbo, but there's a few other items you may want to address before you worry too much about pricing.
Happy to share some feedback if/when you're ready!
Cheers!
Thanks! I'd be super happy to hear more about your feedbacks!
Awesome! Here's a few snap reflections after browsing the site:
https://dev-gryzdl5j.us.auth0.com/Hope that helps! Keep going 🙌
Cool site, I like the timeline that you made for it. I've been playing around with timelines myself.
Anyways, as for your thoughts on pricing and it's impact on a product's perception: I think it's pretty minor. You want to be basing your pricing on the value the customer is going to get out of your product. If you can quantify the benefit of them using your software, then you have a decent idea of how to price it and how important it could be to your customer's success.
Why not just make all products $1,000,000? Then we'd really know we're getting quality items!
Dang, I've been recently considering building a product around Notion, and charts are/were on top of my list.
Who do you consider your competitor? Is it notioncharts.io? I can see that they lowered the price to $1.99/month.
I'd do what @MarieMartens and @filipminev have done with Tally in terms of pricing - offer most of the features for free to gain market share, and charge premium for features needed by businesses.
The one I had in mind is notion 2 charts in 1 word.
Right, there is also notion charts, but it's not really maintained. There's another one as well but super basic.
I like a lot the way Marie and Filip did it, I thought of something like that too to gain users especially that notion 2 charts is pretty restrictive.
Competition is quite different in my case, and I have plenty of room to improve my product and being much better than competition, a lot to do though!
True, the situation is different in your case. And there is room to differentiate not only by pricing/limitations but also by features. For example, if I'm not mistaken, the activity chart is unique for DataJumbo (among charts for notion products).
You're right, I believe there is room for unique features. I'm looking for some stronger differentiators thought
There's a lot 😅 The bigger players would competitors would be Typeform, Jotform, Google Forms, Paperform, Formstack...
I wanted to ask Vincent about competition in the niche of charts for Notion. 😉
Marie, I've linked you in my comment to give Vincent an example of your product's pricing. I believe that offering a generous free plan played a key role in achieving a success in the highly competitive market of form builders.
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