What do you think about a pricing model for B2B apps with producer/consumer or editor/reader user types?
For example, you might have one user, or several users, creating and editing a document, project plan, invoice, or report, and then multiple users consuming it. How would you price that? You could:
- provide bundles of different user type combinations, for example, we’ll give you 1 or 5 writers and up to 10 or 20 or 100 readers
- focus only on the writers/producers, and allow unlimited readers/consumers, i.e., everybody else in the org gets read-only access to the output
- consider only the end product, e.g., you get 5 plans/reports/invoices per month at this rate, 10-20 at the next rung, etc.
There may also be users external to the organization, for example when a project management or similar app allows end-client read or limited write access.
In the case of unlimited consumers, I’d hate to leave money on the table if a big corporation has one primary user, and I don’t charge for everybody else in the organization using the system. That would seem to be a waste, when they are probably prepared to sign off for much more.
I suppose a hybrid of these could also be used to account for this situation, as in 5/10 for the little guy, and “Call us!” for Moneybags, Inc.
I imagine there are many ways to slice and dice this one, but am curious about the experience of others here.