ReadWriteWeb

If you are building a SaaS (Software as a Service) venture, you should be thinking hard about your pricing strategy. It may be the single most critical decision you make. Pricing impacts your marketing, financial and organizational strategy. Are you selling an expensive, complex enterprise solution? Or a simple impulse purchase that an individual can make with a credit card? Will you offer a free, a.k.a.freemium, option?

You cannot fudge these decisions, you have to tell customers how much it will cost before they can commit. To provide input into this decision, it is good to learn what your peers are doing. So I researched 103 SaaS vendors to see how they handled pricing.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I asked all of the vendors, "SaaS or on-premise?" The assumption, because this conference was all about modern 2.0 stuff, was that everyone would say, "SaaS, of course."

Wrong. At least 50% of the vendors were deploying primarily on premise. Even some of the pure SaaS crowd would admit to an occasional on-premise deployment. Anecdotally, even some of those who say they are pure SaaS will deploy on premise quietly. Why are enterprise customers telling vendors that they want on-premise deployment?