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We've lowered our entry price for Prezly, from €240/month to €40/month. Here's the backstory behind it 
1/ http://prez.ly/5l6b
1/ http://prez.ly/5l6b
We launched in 2009 with 2 subscription options: a free plan and a plan that cost €15/month. But since then – as any B2B SaaS blogpost advises – we moved upmarket, steadily raising our prices.
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In 2011 we had small-medium-large plans, respectively priced €20-€50-€200 monthly. At that time, we never expected anyone to pay us €200/month – didn't even have the features ready for that plan when we put it live on the website. A day later someone signed up for it. 3/
In our heads that validated the upmarket strategy. 4/
Each time we reviewed our prices, it boiled down to removing the lowest tier plan and adding a more expensive one. This screenshot is from 2014. 5/
Pricing is notoriously difficult to get right and always causes animated internal discussions. The truth is most of the time, it's simply taken for granted and rarely experimented with. We were no different. 6/
In 2015, we followed the trend and did what all those enterprise SaaS companies do. We stopped publishing our pricing on the website and removed our free trial. Yes, people needed to get on a call with us to see our prices. 7/
In hindsight, it's easy to critique yourself for doing that. Even at the time, it was hard to stomach obscuring our sales process so heavily. But if that's what it took to go upmarket, so be it. All the other companies were doing it… 8/
Around the same time, we hired a 4-person sales team and went hard into prospecting, cold calling and doing outbound to Fortune 500 companies we believed to be a good fit. We already had big enterprises happily using Prezly, so we figured it should be easy to convince others. 9/
We were wrong. Outbound sales is a very different beast. It wasn't because we already had the references of big enterprises that we could convince others that did not have an immediate need. Most of all, I hated it. 10/
So after the outbound hangover, we gradually shifted our focus back to inbound and back to putting our product front and center. It dawned on us that ad-hoc pricing and wilfully obscuring our product wasn't doing anyone any favours. 11/
So we set out to simplify our pricing, charging solely on a per seat basis, with a minimum of 3 seats and a strong push for annual billing. At least we were making it clear to our customers and prospects why they were paying a specific amount. 12/
When early 2019 we brought our prices back to the website. The cheapest plan started at €240/month and included 3 users, billed annually upfront. It was a pretty big leap to make, this came through in our live chat, people asking 1-seat plans, startups a reduced price. 13/
As product builders, we want to provide as much value to as many people as possible. As a business, you want the economics to work. But we always felt conflicted saying no to a freelancer or small company which we know would get tons of value out of Prezly. 14/
So couldn't we find a pricing model that had additional limits, but didn't cost a fortune upfront to start? 15/
It's pretty funny it took us a decade to go full circle and bring our pricing back to how it was when we first started out: having a monthly plan, no minimum seats, low entry price… Yet, I'm convinced we needed to make this journey. 16/
To be able to offer a lower price, you need more volume. To handle more volume, you need to automate onboarding, make your product self-service, have great documentation and tutorials, scale support. So in our case, it meant having a more mature product and a mature company. 17/
Steadily raising our prices early on bought us time and kept us profitable, while we steadily improved the product, found our ground. As product builders, there is no doubt that we'd always pride ourselves on having more people use us, seek out different types of use cases. 18/
Yet, we're still not there. If we've learned anything, it's that pricing is never something that can be set in stone. Nor can it be copied from the businesses you see operating around you. It needs to evolve with you as our company evolves. 19/
And we understand that from a business perspective, it may not be the most revenue-yielding strategy. But it's the one closest to who we are. And I, for one, couldn't be more excited to see what 2021 brings. 20/
