Sign here (comic)
Asana's shocking pricing practices, and how you can get away with it too
Posted eleven years ago
If one apple costs $1, how much would five apples cost? How about 500?
In everyday life, when you buy more of something, you get more bananas for your buck. The fixed costs decrease. If you sell a lot of apples to one person, you don't have to wrap each one, you don't have to pay fixed transaction fees on each sale, and you don't have to worry about finding someone to buy the other 499 apples. The savings are passed on to the consumer. Often, software is priced this way too. That's why I love Asana's pricing page. It breaks the rules.
Asana prices their product based on its value. It lets teams coordinate about projects and tasks they are working on. Asana is very clear about the value they give. In fact, the pricing page tells you that the only difference between the paid and free versions is that "premium plans allow you to coordinate with more team members, as well as the features listed in the table above. All other user features are exactly the same."
It's a mathematical law that as the number of people in a team grows, the number of communication paths grows quadratically. A company with 100 people using it is therefore getting much more value out of it than a company of 15 people, so they pay higher per-seat costs.
Homework
What is the one thing that gives your software value? Are you directly charging for that thing, or something else? How can you take advantage of team effects to provide more value when more people use it?Get tips on improving your software business, right in your inbox
Enter your email and I will send you tips on selling software right in your inbox. I have been selling software since 1998, and whether it's consulting products, adsense, or software as a service, I have done it all, and I want to tell you what I wish I knew when I started.
Steve Hanov makes a living working on
Rhymebrain.com,
rapt.ink,
www.websequencediagrams.com,
and Zwibbler.com. He lives in
Waterloo, Canada.
Post comment
Tool for Creating UML Sequence Diagrams
If you have to draw something called "UML Sequence Diagrams" for work or school, you already know that it can take hours to get a diagram to look right. Here's a web site that will save you some time.
Finding awesome developers in programming interviews
In a job interview, I once asked a very experienced embedded software developer to write a program that reverses a string and prints it on the screen. He struggled with this basic task. This man was awesome. Give him a bucket of spare parts, and he could build a robot and program it to navigate around the room. He had worked on satellites that are now in actual orbit. He could have coded circles around me. But the one thing that he had never, ever needed to do was: display something on the screen.UMA's dirty secrets
Recently, many carriers have started offering UMA, or WiFi phones. These are cell phones with WiFi capabilites. Don't be fooled -- you won't be able to get free calls and run skype on them. The UMA technology is meant to extend the carrier's cellular network into your home using your broadband internet connection.How IE <canvas> tag emulation works
At the time of this writing, Internet Explorer at version 8.0 still lacks the <canvas> tag. But you can easily add the capability by including a short javascript file in your page. At first glance, that's astounding. How do you implement an entire vector graphics API in a few lines of Javascript?How QBASIC almost got me killed
The day arrived when my project was ready to be unleashed upon the world. I waited until the teacher was hovering nearby and then I started my application, running the FORMAT command on the network drive. Some classmates were watching the screen and she hurried over to see what all the fuss was about.
5 Ways PowToon Made Me Want to Buy Their Software
Even though I saw through their tricks at every step along the way, I am now a customer and proud of it. It is worthwhile to look at what they did, because these are simple things that you can do to improve your software business.
Four ways of handling asynchronous operations in node.js
Javascript was not designed to do asynchronous operations easily. If it were, then writing asynchronous code would be as easy as writing blocking code. Instead, developers in node.js need to manage many levels of callbacks. Today, we will examine four different methods of performing the same task asynchronously, in node.js.Usability Nightmare: Xfce Settings Manager
Rant: Why can't anyone make a good settings screen?