SaaS license · Recurring billing
-We have an existing SaaS service ( https://ClearRoadmap.com to see an overview video or subscribe to a trial account) that is structured on a "per Seat" interface model with a client side query tool.
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We've had a request from a client to provide our data as anAPI basedfeed into Tibco Spotfire.
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One option is to continue to do this on a Per Seat basis. This has the advantage of pricing simplicitly and payment simplicitly - OTOH it encourages the client to pull as much of our data as possible and that may be something we wish to avoid
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The other option is charge on a per-query basis through our API. thus every query tranasaction would be charged "x"
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The gotcha is that we don't know what the client's potential usage profile would look like. Our enterprise seat works out to be around $5/hr. Assuming they had a dedicated person doing the queries, and they did a query every 6 minutes, that works out to about $0.50/query.
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OTOH, I actually would expect the query rate to be less than 10 queries/hr 8x5x52. I would expect it to be more like 6 x 4 x 40 which would put the API query pricing at around $1/query.
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The concern with that price point is that I think it prices us out of the market perceptually.
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Perhaps a hybrid might work where we chargea fixed enterprise seat cost that is say 50% of the normal cost. and then charge 50 cents per query thereafter
So does anyone have experiencein pricing a SaaS data source vs. a dedicated SaaS client ?
Thanks for the response Tim. No Tibco is not a reseller. The client is using Tibco Spotfire for various bits of analysis. Essentially Tibco Spotfire is Excel Pivot Tables done with a UX that a human being can figure out.
So I'm not sure how the client is licensing Tibco. I imagine it too is a per-seat license. My concern is that because it is essentially a spreadsheet - if they pull a lot of our data, they could potentially do future pulls and analysis from the pulled data rather than coming back to our dataset.
But explaining this to you has helped me think it through.. thank you