I’d agree it’s very close to 0. Closer than on-premise in my experience as support costs are far far less for SaaS vs on-premise.
Some types of SaaS this might vary a bit, like Snappy has some hard costs per email sent/received that do increase with accounts (though not necessarily so much with users in accounts) but even those tend to be pretty minimal and as long as you’re not doing free accounts are easily covered by even the smallest amount of revenue.
Heh. I’m going to steal that image for my course!
The idea that all software is becoming a commodity doesn’t make sense to me. For a commodity like steel, one ton of grade-a steel is basically the same as another. If there’s no real difference between your software and your competitor’s, it seems to me you’ve done something wrong.
Price approaches the marginal cost of a product only when there are lots of people selling the same thing and they’re competing on price. I’m sure you can find software products where this is happening. But why would you want to play that game?
Markets are never static. And ultimately, if we’re not selling enough of our products, it’s our responsibility.
It could be if you’d sell the same software forever but in SaaS you have ongoing development and maintenance + infrastructure costs that might change with each “batch” of new users. I just don’t think “marginal costs” can be applied to SaaS, i view it in a different light.